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In reviewing the risk of seasonal influenza and the controversial question of health care worker immunization, Thomas Talbot, MD, MPH, paused on a mysterious case study an 'N of 1," if you will, that suggests patients come into hospitals and die of influenza contracted during treatment.
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Infection preventionists and their employee health colleagues undertaking a mandated program to immunize health care workers against flu invariably will run into four groups of people:
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Some infection preventionists have raised concerns about the unintended consequences of contact isolation in hospitals, which are often tied to active screening cultures to detect particular pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA).
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State laws passed in the name of patient safety may straddle infection prevention programs with mandates that ultimately are counterproductive, an infection preventionist warned recently in Fort Lauderdale, FL, at the annual conference of the Association for Prevention of Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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Ah, the good old days when infections were classified as "nosocomial" (hospital-acquired) or not. There wasn't anything else but "we didn't do this thing" or "yes, this is our infection because we gave this to this person at our hospital."
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With the move to "targeting zero" infections and abandoning benchmark ranges comes a new role for the infection preventionists: agent of change.
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This large multicenter, randomized, controlled parallel-group trial found that intensive glucose management, compared to conventional (target glucose 81-108 mg/dL vs. ≤ 180 mg/dL), increases 90-day mortality in both medical and surgical ICU patients.
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Patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with acute chest pain are a significant portion of our health care budget.
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Observational studies have suggested statins may not only reduce arterial cardiovascular events but also venous thromboembolism.
