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Physicians take an oath to do no harm to their patients. That covers not just life-and-death decisions, but the routine protections against infection. To emphasize that connection, Johanna Goldfarb, MD, head of pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital at The Cleveland Clinic, asks health care workers to take an oath to comply with hand hygiene.
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As part of an increasing emphasis on patient empowerment and education, infection control professionals have seen arcane terms such as "nosocomial" de-emphasized in favor of clearer language.
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A "tool kit" created by an expert panel on hospital infection reporting laws addresses the controversial issue of surgical site infections (SSIs), advising ICPs and state legislatures to focus tracking and reporting efforts on the most severe SSIs to ensure fair comparative data.
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Hospitals and other medical facilities that do not use rapid HIV assays to test source patients after a blood exposure to a health care worker risk citations and fines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Hospital Infection Control has learned.
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Though conceding there is considerable evidence to support the use of active surveillance cultures (ASC) to detect patient colonization with antimicrobial-resistant pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the nation's leading infection prevention groups have come out jointly against mandating the practice through legislation.
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The Joint Commission is trying to solve the Achilles heel of hand hygiene: monitoring compliance by health care workers. As part of its increasing emphasis on infection control, the The Joint Commission is seeking innovative and cost-effective methods to address adherence to hand hygiene guidelines.
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Professional burnout is a psychological syndrome in response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. In order to determine the prevalence of burnout among physicians working in ICUs, and to investigate associated factors, the investigators carried out a nationwide one-day survey study in the adult ICUs of 189 French public hospitals.
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Ouimet and colleagues at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal studied 820 consecutive patients admitted to their mixed medical-surgical ICU to determine the incidence of delirium, factors associated with it, and its clinical consequences. The patients were adults who stayed in the ICU more than 24 hours and survived for at least 1 day.
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Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP) is a major nosocomial infection associated with increased morbidity and perhaps with some attributable mortality. There has been great controversy as to which is the best practical strategy to diagnose and treat VAP.
