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An unlucky 13 out of every 1,000 inpatients in recently surveyed hospitals were either infected or colonized with Clostridium difficile, a rate that is 6.5 to 20 times higher than previous incidence estimates.
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that a final rule will appear in the Nov. 18, 2008, Federal Register detailing changes to the agency's outpatient ambulatory surgical center (ASC) payment system.
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Under standard IC.01.03.01, The Joint Commission requires that the hospital identifies risks for acquiring and transmitting infections.
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Citing a dramatic disconnect between the tens of thousands of patients dying annually with health care-associated infections (HAIs) and the paltry number that actually are being reported as sentinel events, The Joint Commission is urging hospitals to file the voluntary reports to help improve patient safety.
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As a new generation of health care epidemiologists comes into the work force, these physicians may find that hospital administrators have a troubling lack of awareness about the resources required to run an infection prevention program in today's increasingly regulatory environment.
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(Editor's note: In this issue of IP Newbie, we feature a column for new professionals written by Patti Grant, an infection preventionist and editorial advisory board member of this publication. An IP since 1990, Grant was profiled in the debut issue of this supplement. She has a passion for mentoring that will add invaluable "in-the-trenches" insights for new practitioners in the field.)
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The infection prevention community has lost some measure of credibility in the public and political eye and must embrace the patient advocacy movement to regain a leadership role, said Steve Weber, MD, a health care epidemiologist at the University of Chicago.
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Tracheostomy confers patient benefits such as decreasing laryngeal irritation, improving patient communication, and decreasing sedation requirements, but the optimal timing of this procedure in critically ill patients remains a subject of considerable debate.
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Investigators in the Department of Neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, reviewed the charts of patients admitted with myasthenic crisis (MC) between 1987 and 2006 who received either invasive or noninvasive mechanical ventilation.