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Editor's note: This is part one of our coverage of a presentation on mentoring by Carolyn E. Jackson, RN, MA, CIC, infection preventionist at SHW Hadley Hospital and Skilled Nursing Facility in Washington, DC. Jackson spoke recently in New Orleans at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). For part two of this story, see the next installment of Wisdom Teachers.
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Squaring off with the nation's leading infection prevention groups, health care worker unions and associations are urging the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop an infectious disease standard that would essentially regulate and enforce infection control programs in hospitals.
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More health care workers received the flu vaccine last season than ever before, but that has not eased the pressure to boost immunization rates.
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Many will have an opinion, yet the question in the headline cannot be definitively answered. I will not attempt to solve the debate, but let me try to shed a little light on it.
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Despite dramatic and widely reported breakthroughs in preventing bloodstream infections, the cold truth is that too many infection preventionists labor in obscurity, their programs woefully underfunded by administrators blind to the power of prevention.
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Infection preventionists must seize an extraordinary moment in health care, when divergent forces are aligning to redesign a system that has failed to contain costs and protect the lives to which it has been entrusted, Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, said recently in New Orleans in the keynote address at the 37th annual educational conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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Alarming public health officials, a highly drug-resistant gram negative bacterial strain that is emerging rapidly in hospitals in India has been detected in patients in three U.S. states.
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Hospitals that adopt advanced computer technology to identify healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are more likely to have implemented best practices to prevent such infections, according to research presented recently in New Orleans at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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In a discussion that goes well beyond the implied semantics of a simple name change, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) continues to try to define its "brand" in a rapidly changing marketplace.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which erred on the side of caution and consternation for infection preventionists during the flu pandemic now concedes surgical masks are sufficient to protect health care workers against H1N1 influenza A. Draft guidelines for seasonal influenza downgrade the controversial recommendation to wear N95 respirators.
