Stephen I. Feller , 2025-06-23 19:53:00
June 23, 2025
1 min watch
PHOENIX — A video clip depicting the transmission of Clostridioides difficile won the film festival at the Association for Professionals in Infection Prevention and Epidemiology annual meeting.
“Chain of Transmission with Clostridioides difficile” was created by a team of infection preventionists from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
“We wanted to tackle specifically transmission-based infections, and specifically C. difficile, because it can be a confusing topic and we wanted to be able to highlight in a fun way that would stick with people why hand hygiene and being aware of your environment is really important,” Kaila Cooper, MSN, RN, CIC, nursing director of the health care infection prevention program at VCU Health, told Healio.
The 4-minute video, which Cooper said was inspired by Allstate’s “Mayhem” commercials, follows a fourth wall-breaking C. difficile character who shows how easy the pathogen can spread in hospitals and health care facilities.
The video is one of more than 100 on-demand courses, clinical training videos and webinars that have been produced by the Virginia Infection Prevention Training Center, of which Cooper is also the associate director.
The festivals Grand Prize winner was chosen by a group of judges selected from among the conference’s Annual Conference Committee.
A second video from the center was also entered into the “People’s Choice” category, which is voted on by conference attendees, titled “Hand hygiene with Florence Nightingale,” but lost out to another hand hygiene-themed video produced by Santa Clara Valley Healthcare at O’Connor Hospital called “Don’t forget to just wash.”
The training center was established with a $6 million grant from the Virginia Department of Health in 2001 using COVID-19-related federal funding to provide both in-person and interactive online training for ID clinicians in Virginia.
The center worked with Rock Creek Productions to refine and organize their storytelling, as well as ultimately produce the finished videos, according to Cooper.
Although the center lost its grant funds earlier this year with the pullback of more than $11 billion in grants awarded for state and local public health efforts during and related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cooper said the website and its contents remain online.
“We still have all our content up on our site, and all our videos are there,” Cooper said. “We’re working to maintain those so that they will always be available.”
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Kaila Cooper, MSN, RN, CIC, can be reached at kaila.cooper@vcu.edu.
