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Standard infection control precautions only protect patients if they are followed on every shift, and an audit is how a team finds out whether they are. This free infection control audit checklist is for IPC teams, link practitioners, ward and practice managers and care home managers who audit one area at a time. One run is one audit of one ward, clinic, GP or dental practice, or care home area. It plans the audit from last time’s open actions, then works through the ten elements of standard precautions in NHS England’s National IPC Manual on the day of the visit: the environment, hand hygiene and PPE, sharps, linen and waste, care equipment, patient placement and respiratory hygiene, and staff safety and training. It ends with scores, an action plan, the IPC lead’s sign-off and feedback to the team. A first question shows England or United States references, and a re-audit phase appears when a score falls below your pass mark.
NHS England’s National Infection Prevention and Control Manual (NIPCM) says standard infection control precautions are to be used by all staff, in all care settings, at all times, for all patients, whether infection is known to be present or not. It also says monitoring of those precautions must be ongoing. An infection control audit is that monitoring for one area: an auditor walks the ward, clinic, practice or care home, watches care as it happens, checks the records and scores what they find against the ten elements of standard precautions. In England the Code of Practice under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 asks registered providers to monitor their IPC policies with a rolling programme of audit. In the United States, CDC’s core practices call it performance monitoring and feedback.
The audit is not the only infection control check a service runs. Instrument reprocessing has its own record for every load, kept with the Medical Equipment Sterilization Checklist. Preparing evidence for a regulator is a separate job again, covered by the CQC Inspection Readiness Checklist and the Joint Commission Survey Readiness Checklist. Your IPC audits are some of the evidence those two checklists gather.
Asks: are the standard precautions in place and followed today, by the people on shift?
When: on the cycle your organisation sets, and again after a poor result.
Output: a score for each element, findings, an action plan with owners and the IPC lead’s sign-off.
Asks: was every step of cleaning, inspection, packaging, sterilisation and storage done for this load?
When: every load, in the decontamination or sterile services area.
Output: a load record that traces each tray to its cycle.
Asks: can we show the regulator that our systems work, including how we manage infection risk?
When: continuously, ahead of an inspection or survey.
Output: evidence organised by the regulator’s questions or standards, with your audits among it.
Eight phases take one audit from planning to sign-off. Phases 2 to 6 follow the ten elements of standard infection control precautions on the day of the visit. Phase 8 appears only when a score falls below the pass mark your organisation sets.
Agree what the audit covers and read the records before the visit. An audit that does not start from last time’s open actions tends to find the same problems again.
The NIPCM says the care environment must be visibly clean, free from non-essential items and equipment, well maintained and in a good state of repair.
Most of this phase is watching care as it happens. Record what you saw, not what staff say they usually do, and ask about anything you could not judge by watching.
Containers, bags and stores are quick to check and easy to get wrong. The NIPCM’s rules here are specific, so check them one by one.
Communal equipment moves between patients, and an infection can move with it. Placement and isolation decisions are checked against the patient notes, not against memory.
The NIPCM says staff must understand what to do after a significant occupational exposure, and that there is a legal requirement to report all sharps injuries and near misses to line managers or employers.
Score the result the same way every time, so this audit can be compared with the last one. The IPC lead signs off the report before it goes to the team, and nothing after the sign-off can be completed until they do.
Shown only when a score falls below the pass mark your organisation sets. The actions are worked through, then the elements that fell short are audited again.
The NIPCM sets out ten elements of standard infection control precautions (SICPs). NHS England’s SICPs monitoring tool has a sheet for each one, and this checklist covers all ten across Phases 2 to 6. Use the right-hand column as a starting point for each element, then add what your own policy asks for.
| SICP element | What the NIPCM says | What to check on the audit |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Patient placement and assessment of infection risk | Patients are assessed for infection risk on arrival at the care area and reviewed throughout their stay, and the assessment guides where they are placed. | Assessments recorded in the notes, isolation or cohorting while results are awaited, and infection status passed on at transfer. |
| 2. Hand hygiene | Handrub at the point of care for routine hand hygiene; soap and water when hands are visibly soiled and for vomiting, diarrhoea or a gastrointestinal infection. | Basins and dispensers, bare below the elbow, the five moments and technique, watched in practice. |
| 3. Respiratory and cough hygiene | Cover the nose and mouth with a tissue, dispose of it promptly and clean hands afterwards. Staff help patients who need assistance. | Tissues, a bag or bin and hand hygiene for patients with symptoms, and signs at the entrance. |
| 4. Personal protective equipment | PPE is chosen by assessing the likely exposure to blood and body fluids, stored close to the point of use, single use unless the manufacturer says otherwise, and changed after each patient or task. | Stock and storage, the right PPE for each task, no gloves for tasks without exposure, and safe removal. |
| 5. Safe management of care equipment | Reusable non-invasive equipment is decontaminated between each use, after contamination, at set intervals and before servicing or repair. Single-use items are never reused. | Ten items of equipment inspected, decontamination protocols and planned maintenance records. |
| 6. Safe management of the care environment | The environment is visibly clean, free from non-essential items, well maintained and adequately ventilated, and routinely cleaned to the National Cleaning Standards. | Curtains, bathrooms, floors, high areas and high-touch surfaces, cleaning schedules and products. |
| 7. Safe management of linen | Clean linen is stored off the floor and apart from used linen. Used linen is not shaken or sorted, and infectious linen goes in a water-soluble bag. | Clean linen storage, bags at the point of care, two-thirds full at most, tagged and dated. |
| 8. Safe management of blood and body fluid spillages | All spillages are treated as hazardous and dealt with immediately by trained staff, with clear responsibility in each area. | A spill kit in the area, and staff who know the product and technique. |
| 9. Safe disposal of waste, including sharps | Waste goes into the right colour-coded stream at the point of use. Sharps containers are labelled, dated, closed when not in use and not filled beyond the fill line. | Segregation, bag filling and labels, the lockable store, and every sharps container in the area. |
| 10. Occupational safety: prevention of exposure | Sharps are not re-sheathed or passed hand to hand, and are discarded by the user at the point of use. Staff know what a significant exposure is and what to do. | Sharps practice watched, staff asked about exposures, and injuries since the last audit reviewed. |
Scoring and the pass mark. Neither the NIPCM nor the Code of Practice sets a national pass mark for an IPC audit. The NHS England monitoring tool asks the auditor to mark areas of good practice, areas requiring improvement and areas requiring immediate action, and says each organisation should decide locally how often to monitor. Set your own pass mark on the first task, leave checks you could not observe out of the score, and score every audit the same way.
Outside England. CDC’s core infection prevention and control practices group the same precautions under standard precautions: hand hygiene, environmental cleaning and disinfection, injection and medication safety, risk assessment with PPE, minimising potential exposures and reprocessing reusable equipment. Choose United States on the first task to show CDC’s wording on the tasks that need it. Elsewhere in the UK, choose the third option and work to your own nation’s guidance: the NIPCM notes that some operational details differ across the nations.
A recurring schedule starts each area’s audit on the cycle you choose, quarterly for example, assigned to its auditor. The due dates count from the audit start date, so planning, the visit, the report and the sign-off land in order, and a score below your pass mark adds the re-audit phase to that run.
The IPC lead is chosen on the first task. The sign-off is assigned to them alone, and nothing after the approval step can be completed until they record a decision. Their decision, any conditions and the report itself stay on the checklist with the date.
Every run keeps its scores table, photos and action plan with names and dates. The Reports Grid lists every area’s audit with the answers given, including the overall score, and Analytics shows overdue and late tasks by person and step.
CheckFlow does not decide whether practice in an area is safe. That judgement is the auditor’s and the IPC lead’s, recorded on each task. It runs the audit around it: who does what, by when, with what evidence, and who signed it off. CheckFlow’s healthcare checklist software shows how the same approach handles other clinical processes.
An infection found on the ward may also be an incident: the Healthcare Incident Reporting Process Checklist takes it through investigation. Audit results feed the CQC Inspection Readiness Checklist and the Joint Commission Survey Readiness Checklist, instrument loads are recorded with the Medical Equipment Sterilization Checklist, and new staff get their IPC induction through the New Nurse Onboarding Checklist.
CQC Inspection Readiness Checklist (England)
Medical Equipment Sterilization Checklist
Healthcare Incident Reporting Process Checklist
Joint Commission Survey Readiness Checklist
New Nurse Onboarding Checklist
Describe the process in a sentence and the AI checklist generator drafts the phases and tasks for you.
An infection control audit is a structured check of infection prevention and control practice in one area, such as a ward, clinic, GP or dental practice, or care home. The auditor watches care as it happens, inspects the environment and equipment, checks the records and scores what they find, usually against the ten elements of standard infection control precautions. The result is a score for each element, a list of findings, an action plan with owners and deadlines, and a sign-off by the IPC lead. The Code of Practice describes audit as part of a quality improvement process.
In England, the ten elements of standard infection control precautions from the National IPC Manual: patient placement and assessment of infection risk, hand hygiene, respiratory and cough hygiene, personal protective equipment, safe management of care equipment, the care environment, linen, blood and body fluid spillages, safe disposal of waste including sharps, and occupational safety. A useful audit also reviews last time’s open actions, staff training records and sharps injuries, then ends with scores, an action plan, the IPC lead’s sign-off and feedback to the team.
There is no single national frequency. NHS England’s SICPs monitoring tool says each organisation should decide locally how often to monitor, and suggests completing it first to set a baseline. The Code of Practice asks registered providers to monitor their IPC policies with a rolling programme of audit. You may want to audit higher-risk areas more often, and to repeat an audit sooner after a poor result or an outbreak. Set the cycle in your IPC programme and run it as a recurring schedule so no area is missed.
National guidance does not set one. The NIPCM and the Code of Practice say what good practice looks like, not what percentage counts as a pass. The NHS England monitoring tool asks the auditor to mark areas of good practice, areas requiring improvement and areas requiring immediate action. Agree a pass mark, or a red, amber and green scale, in your own IPC policy. Record it on the first task of this checklist, and score every audit the same way so results can be compared over time.
No. NHS England says the monitoring tool is not compulsory. It can be used in place of, or in addition to, the local tools organisations already use to check that the guidance in the National IPC Manual is followed. The tool has a sheet for each of the ten elements and a summary sheet, with space for five hand hygiene observations, five PPE observations and ten items of reusable equipment. It says local policy decides how many observations to make in a period. This checklist follows the same ten elements.
Yes. The Health and Social Care Act 2008 Code of Practice applies to all registered providers of health and adult social care in England, including care homes, primary medical care and primary dental care. CQC applies it in proportion to the setting, so a care home is not expected to have the same facilities as an acute hospital. The code has appendices for adult social care, dental and primary medical care, and each names audits undertaken and the actions that followed as part of the annual IPC statement.
Someone trained to audit, using a standard tool. The Code of Practice gives responsibility for IPC to the Director of IPC in NHS organisations and to a designated IPC lead elsewhere, who in a care home, GP or dental practice could be the registered provider, the registered manager or another member of staff. CDC’s core practices say the staff who monitor practice should be trained and use standardised tools and definitions. An auditor from outside the area often sees what has become normal there. The IPC lead signs off the result.
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