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Memo to the Centers from Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from two leading surgeons on the literal cutting edge of infection prevention in the OR: Hospitals and federal regulators should encourage the use of newer and safer types of surgery and more transparency with patients on procedure options and possible outcomes. That would do more to reduce surgical site infection (SSI) rates than inspections by CMS and other government regulators.
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As the lines blur between patient safety and worker safety, employee health professionals including those "two-hat" infection preventionists with dual responsibilities can expect much more scrutiny from regulators who traditionally focused on patient care.
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Recently I've chosen a major change in job responsibilities. For the second time I'm the sole Infection Preventionist (IP) for a facility, but this time the realm of 'Quality' is included, and my facility is a 32-bed surgical hospital including a four-bed ICU. It was time to challenge myself to keep learning new approaches to age-old problems surrounding patient safety. Talk about moving out of the comfort zone!
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to develop an infection control survey slated for use in the nation's hospitals later this year, using expert feedback and "pre-testing" results from the field to create a 42-page tool that assesses a wide breadth of program issues.
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The Veterans Health Administration has developed best practices in handling large-scale epidemiologic look-back investigations, including finding a way to explain a potential exposure of blood-borne viruses to a large number of people who likely were not impacted by the incident.
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Your influenza vaccination campaign is coming into the public spotlight, and that means more pressure than ever on the logistics of administering and tracking those vaccinations.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's rapidly expanding National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) has long been the gold standard surveillance system for health care associated infections (HAIs).
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A compounding-pharmacy assessment tool developed by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) can provide critical guidance for hospitals in the wake of the national meningitis outbreak.
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"By the time we learned this was a problem around the country, the information from Tennessee had already narrowed it down to what the problem was. [It was] a textbook case of how to do it right." Paul Jarris, MD, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
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A common question in clinical practice about the shingles vaccine is whether it is effective in preventing recurrent episodes in patients who have had herpes zoster (HZ).
