The Built Environment of the Hospital and Nosocomial Infections

The Built Environment of the Hospital and Nosocomial Infections: Sources and Transmission Routes

13 August 2025 @ 12.00 CET

We are delighted to invite you to the next ISAC and ESCMID webinar. Explore how hospital design directly impacts infection control in this insightful webinar featuring two leading experts.

• Professor Margreet Vos highlights why hospital design matters in preventing nosocomial infections.

• Professor Paul Anantharajah Tambyah reflects on lessons from the pandemic and how the built environment can be optimized for future resilience.

Join us to understand how architecture, infrastructure, and infection prevention intersect in modern healthcare.

Speaker bios

Prof. Dr Margreet C. Vos is a Clinical Microbiologist and since 2012, she is a professor of healthcare related infections at the ErasmusMC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She has received more than 200 invited lectures nationally and internationally and has around 235 peer reviewed publications (H index 35 (2022)), on infection prevention, in particular MSSA/MRSA, the Search and Destroy strategy, hand hygiene, outbreaks, transmission, innate environment, hospital environment and hospital design and endoscope related contamination and infections. Currently, she is promotor of about 10 PhD students. She is member or chair of many (inter)national committees or working groups on infection prevention in general or specific on MRSA, hospital design infection prevention. For many years she initiated and chaired a national working group (HIP) as part of the Dutch Society of Medical Microbiology (NVMM) and initiated, developed and chaired the committee on infection control national guideline on the organization and quality of hospital infection prevention and developed audits for quality of hospital infection prevention. Currently, she is a member of two international guideline committees: The ESCMID-HIS guideline on Behavior and Rituals in the Operation Theatre and the ESCMID-EUCIC Guideline on Multi-Drug-Resistant Gram-negatives. She was the project-leader of an international (UK FR NL) JPI MACOTRA consortium on (un)success of MRSA clones. She is the former chair and currently the scientific officer of ESGNI (ESCMID) and chair of the ISAC S. Aureus Working Group.

Prof. Paul Ananth Tambyah is currently Professor of Medicine at the National University of Singapore and Senior Consultant Infectious Diseases Physician at the National University Health System. He is also visiting consultant to the National Center for Infectious Diseases and the Singapore Armed Forces. He is immediate Past President of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection and Immediate Past President of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. His research interests are device associated infection and emerging infectious diseases

Prof. Souha Kanj is currently a tenured Professor of Medicine, Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases (ID), Chair of the Infection Control (IC) Program and co-Chair of the Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) Program at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Lebanon. She is Consultant Professor at Duke University Medical Center, USA.
She has co-authored 300 papers in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and UpToDate® cards. She has contributed to the work of WHO in various programmes.
Professor Kanj is a fellow of the ACP, IDSA, RCP, ESCMID, and ECMM. She is currently President of ISAC and President of the Lebanese Society for Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology.
Professor Kanj has been the recipient of numerous honours and awards and an honorary degree from Radboud University in 2020.

Prof. Robert Skov is a medical doctor from University of Copenhagen and specialist in clinical microbiology. He works as senior consultant for the director of Epidemic Disease Preparedness at Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark and is the current President for the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID).

Robert has worked on antimicrobial resistance throughout his career with more than 25 years’ experience as a Public Health microbiologist. From 2019 – 2024 he was the scientific lead of the International Centre for Antimicrobial resistance Solutions (ICARS). He has served as Danish AMR focal point at ECDC, member of the EUCAST steering committee, the EMA Expert Group (AMEG), and Danish and international expert groups on AMR including One Health cross sectorial committees. He is a member of ESGS and since 2020 he is board member of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) and President of ESCMID since May 2024. His research has mainly focused on S. aureus inclusive MRSA detection, resistance mechanisms and epidemiology as well as AMR testing, he has published +230 peer reviewed papers.