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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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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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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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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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Timsit et al conducted a 2x2 randomized, controlled trial comparing chlorhexidine-impregnated sponges in the dressing of vascular catheters with control dressings.
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With more hospitals in recent years considering mandatory seasonal flu immunizations for health care workers, the rise and highly anticipated seasonal resurgence of H1N1 influenza A raises a compelling question: Will the first pandemic in 41 years add momentum to increasing calls to make flu immunization a condition of health care employment?
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Syncope is commonly accepted to be a danger sign in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). In this paper, Spirito et al report data from a registry of 1,511 patients with HCM who have been followed longitudinally at four institutions.
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In a randomized, multicenter trial, chlorhexidine-impregnated sponges used in the dressing of intravascular catheters reduced catheter-related infections by 60%. Increasing the interval of catheter-related dressing changes from 3 to 7 days did not increase the rate of infection.