It's said that the most dangerous places on the planet are the very buildings we all deem to be the safest: hospitals!

If we think about it for a moment, hospitals are where only the really sick and/or injured go when they need life-saving help. All those people, diseases, infections, open wounds, and airborne viruses floating around, such as MRSA, for example, and no matter how clean we all are, nature is always going to win. 

We go into these hospitals sick, and as a result, our immune systems are already compromised.   

What does this have to do with wildlife rescue and rehabilitation? I hear you ask.

My answer is … absolutely everything.

This is exactly the same situation with wildlife hospitals. And no matter how clean we keep these places, there is always going to be a risk factor we all must consider.  Disease outbreaks can be a problem, especially in crowded wildlife hospitals, and considering the rotations of areas used are constantly in high in demand (space, resources and available work spaces) we do have a series of issues within a practice which we have to overcome to avoid or better still prevent these outbreaks from happening. 

This year, we (the team) pledged to each other to keep notes and valuable data about how we operated and how we could keep our patients and staff safe and, ultimately, improve our clinical success rates here at OWR. 

The results are simply outstanding.  And below, we have outlined how we went about improving our work spaces and ultimately our clinical success rates., which includes a few species specific case studies too.