Dr Sani Aliyu, consultant in microbiology and infectious diseases, tells us his CUH story.
Video: Sani tells us his story and what he enjoys about CUH
Link: https://youtu.be/GhyA5-GIXUQ
Q. Sani, what’s your role in our hospitals?
I work in microbiology and infectious diseases as a consultant. I’m also the Caldicott Guardian for CUH. The Caldicott Guardian is the person responsible for protecting health and care information - essentially our health data - and also making sure the data is used appropriately in situations where this is warranted.
Q: What do you like most about CUH?
CUH is a centre of excellence. I work with colleagues who are very professional, are committed and really like their jobs.
There are a number of reasons why I like working at CUH:
CUH has a culture of continuous learning. I’m always amazed when I go to a multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meeting and come out thinking ‘gosh, I’ve learned something new today’.
Over the years, I have also seen colleagues grow and mature, for example medical students all the way through their training to becoming consultants. I’ve also seen departments grow and mature. For instance, when I started as a trainee there were only four consultants in microbiology and there are now 10 of us.
People say opportunities come only once in a lifetime, but at CUH there are multiple opportunities to build a career.
A career here is strong and fulfilling; the opportunities are there, provided you are really ready to look.
Probably what I value most about working here are the friends; the relationships I’ve built over the years with people who have essentially become family.
This isn’t just the colleagues I work with, it’s also the patients. I have patients that have been attending my clinics since 2004. CUH is a really good place to work.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your CUH journey?
I came to CUH in early 2001 as a senior house officer and six months later I was appointed to the first joint training post in microbiology and infections. I finished my training in July 2007 and briefly left CUH to go to Birmingham as a consultant microbiologist. I returned to CUH in July 2008 as the first joint consultant in microbiology and infectious diseases, and in 2015, I was appointed as the Caldicott Guardian, dealing with information governance issues.
In 2016 I went to work abroad in Nigeria to strengthen their health system, specifically their HIV programme. This was a great opportunity to put something back into the community I came from and to help save countless lives in the process.
Q: Why do you like working at CUH?
One of the reasons I like working at CUH is the multi-cultural nature of the environment, the fact that we have colleagues from all parts of the world. Everybody is trying their best to contribute to patient safety and wellbeing. That inclusiveness is really very critical when it comes to getting the best from our staff.
Q: What does a usual day look like?
Every day is different, particularly as I work across laboratories and clinical departments. On the lab side we deal with specimens, we send out reports, we liaise with colleagues about antibiotic prescribing, we try to improve practice and patient management. On the clinical side, I run a weekly HIV clinic and have designated weeks working on the wards as an infectious diseases consultant.
In between, I have the Caldicott Guardian work and this role has really expanded in the last few years. This is partly due to developments in information technology and artificial intelligence, plus the fact we are dealing with a much larger volume of data than we used to.
It’s exciting to work here and I strongly believe that every staff member has something to contribute and there’s something for everybody here at CUH.
Q: Is there a patient story or something at CUH that really stands out to you?
There are things we have done over the years that have changed the way we practise and have improved things. The amount of work that has gone into reducing infection numbers has been amazing and presently, CUH is one of the safest hospitals when it comes to control of hospital-acquired infections.
This is thanks to my infection control colleagues who have worked around the clock, as well as my consultant colleagues and also management for placing such priority on antibiotic stewardship.
We introduced antibiotic support ward rounds some years ago, which have now become part of our day-to-day microbiology work in the lab. In addition, thanks to the introduction of Epic in 2014, for the first time we were able to leverage to change the way people prescribe antibiotics. Nowadays people are very much aware of the importance of judicious antibiotic prescribing. Here at CUH we do not have the level of antibiotic resistance seen at other hospitals. I believe CUH is a much safer place for our patients because of the amount of work that has gone into infection control.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the work we undertook abroad to sort out the HIV epidemic in Nigeria. When I went there in 2016/17 there were major issues with the HIV programme, but more importantly people didn’t really know the true prevalence of HIV in the country. We were able to deliver a very large HIV-specific survey, possibly the biggest ever done in the world. Through that, we were able to establish the true burden of HIV infection and where to find those patients. Over the last one and a half years, the country has made tremendous progress in placing more people on treatment for HIV. The country is now well on the way to achieving HIV eradication, simply by making use of data properly.