Hospital Infection Control & Prevention
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IDWeek 2017: Resistant Bugs Rampant in Long-term Care
The nation’s long-term care facilities are teeming with multidrug-resistant organisms, giving pathogens that can cause virtually untreatable infections access to vulnerable patient populations across the healthcare continuum.
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Unintended Consequences: Steps to Fight Sepsis Increase C. diff
A hospital effort to rapidly identify potential sepsis cases and initiate antibiotic treatment led to an unintended consequence: an increase in Clostridium difficile infections.
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IDWeek: Antibiotic Use in Dentistry Driving Up C. diff Rates
Dentists prescribe a surprising amount of antibiotics, and this can lead to adverse patient consequences in the community.
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‘Mystery Patient Drills’ Test Hospital Readiness
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently conducted elaborate “mystery patient drills” that used in-house collaborators to evaluate clinical readiness in ED staff.
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Communication Failures Let Multidrug-resistant Bug Spread Between Settings
An outbreak of extremely drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii at multiple facilities in Oregon underscores an open secret: There are disincentives to telling the receiving facility that the patient has a history of a drug-resistant bacteria or other problematic pathogens.
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H3N2 Flu Strain Mismatch Could Hit Elderly Patients Hard
Elderly and long-term care staff are all too often the most under-immunized healthcare workers.
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Virulent, Drug-resistant Pneumonia Bug Emerges in China ICU
In particularly unwelcome news from China, researchers report they have isolated a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae that is both hypervirulent and highly drug-resistant. A worse combination is difficult to imagine. Usually, hypervirulent K. pneumoniae remains susceptible to drugs, but acquiring resistance apparently through genetic transfer in nature means this is a bug that could possibly infect heathy people in the community, let alone frail hospital patients.
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Poor Oral Care During Hospitalization May Lead to Pneumonia
Ventilator-associated pneumonia is a commonly tracked healthcare-associated infection, and frequently the target of interventions to protect patients. On the other hand, non-ventilator healthcare-associated pneumonia falls into a gray area, where it often remains unreported in surveillance systems.
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CMS, Joint Commission Are Citing for ‘Flash’ Sterilization
The abiding principle is that if you must rapidly sterilize an instrument — usually in an effort to return it to the sterile field — you must immediately use it.
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SSIs: A Common and Costly Infection
The CDC has issued new guidelines for the prevention of the most common and costly healthcare-associated infection: surgical site infections.