Patients with coronary artery disease who have received intra-coronary, drug-eluding stents (DES) may benefit from longer courses of clopidogrel than is currently standard.
Patients with coronary artery disease who have received intra-coronary, drug-eluding stents (DES) may benefit from longer courses of clopidogrel than is currently standard.
Although it is known that cigarette smoking is the most prevalent risk factor for lung cancer, other risk factors are important. It is notable that 10% of men and 20% of women with lung cancer never smoked, and that nearly half of patients are former smokers.
Health care-associated infections (HAIs) have traditionally been viewed with a certain air of epidemiological inevitability, seen in many cases as the unpreventable result of keeping very sick patients alive via invasive devices and other medical interventions.
It may seem intuitive, even obvious to experienced ICPs, but acquiring an infection during hospitalization is about as bad as it gets for a patient. Even patients with a host of maladies that compromise their recovery fared significantly better in outcomes than patients who acquired infections.
Having worked with a "physician champion" and greatly lowered infection rates by adopting an industrial process model, an infection control professional has joined the chorus that say infections are not an inevitable byproduct of medical care.
Empowering nurses and other clinicians to speak up when they perceive a patient safety problem may be the most important component of emerging new programs designed to drive infection rates to zero, emphasizes Sara Cosgrove, MD, hospital epidemiologist at John Hopkins in Baltimore.
Sandiumenge and colleagues evaluated the effects of three strategies of antibiotic prescribing in a 14-bed ICU. The strategies were applied serially, beginning with an initial 10-month period during which patients with suspected ventilator-associated pneumonia received "patient-specific therapy" in which multiple antibiotic regimens, chosen on the basis of length-of-stay and recent antibiotic exposure, were used.