Articles Tagged With:
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Expansive Survey Reveals Possible Sea Change in American Nursing
The next decade will be filled with many challenges, testing nurses’ resilience.
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Kill the Bug, Hurt the Worker
Powerful cleaning and disinfectant products are being deployed in hospitals to eradicate dangerous pathogens on environmental surfaces. Both spore-forming Clostridioides difficile and an emerging fungal strain of Candida auris require strong sporicidals to be eradicated from the hospital environment. Yet the price of protecting the patient is being exacted on healthcare workers who may have serious complications after repeated exposure to these chemicals in disinfectants.
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FDA Calls for Redesigned Scopes to Protect Patients
Conceding that conventional duodenoscopes cannot be reliably reprocessed between patients, the Food and Drug Administration is recommending that manufacturers and providers move to disposable components for the intricate devices.
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IPs Have Critical Role in Healthcare Worker Infection Guidelines
New guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protect healthcare workers from infections call for infection preventionists to be key collaborators with occupational health departments.
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Antibiotic Stewardship: Glass Half Full or Nearly Empty?
Though there has been tremendous progress in antibiotic stewardship efforts over the last decade, a broad and demanding array of research and action is needed if the rise of drug-resistant bacterial infections is to be stemmed, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America reports in a new white paper.
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APIC Issues Call to Action Against Antivaccine Movement
The antivaccine movement is lobbying state legislatures to widen exemptions against childhood school immunizations and other mandates. As infection preventionists, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology has taken on the fight.
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Anticoagulation Decisions in Atrial Fibrillation
Using the Delphi method of arriving at a consensus among clinicians concerning to whom with atrial fibrillation to recommend oral anticoagulants, the risk of stroke, the risk of hemorrhage, and patient-specific factors emerged. Many of these factors are not included in the guidelines and should be studied further.
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Optimizing AED Placement Locations
A study of the location of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) compared to the location of automatic external defibrillators (AED) in Denmark showed that if the placements of AEDs more closely matched the location of OHCAs, bystander defibrillation and 30-day survival would improve.
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Cardiac Constriction vs. Cardiac Restriction
The five Mayo Clinic Doppler echocardiographic criteria for the diagnosis of constrictive pericarditis (CP) were tested in a group of surgically confirmed CP compared to a group of cardiac biopsy proven amyloid restrictive cardiomyopathy. Interventricular septal bounce and an elevated mitral annular medial e’ were found to be the most accurate criteria, especially if used together.
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Value of PET Scans in Infective Endocarditis
18F-FDG PET/CT imaging in a consecutive series of patients with proven infective endocarditis was of diagnostic value in those with prosthetic value endocarditis and of prognostic value in all cases.