-
-
-
Faced with high readmission rates and patients who made multiple visits to the emergency department and were hospitalized frequently, a multidisciplinary team at Lehigh Valley Health Network began analyzing the cases of frequent utilizers one at a time, getting to the root cause of the readmissions, and developing a plan to keep them out of the hospital and emergency department.
-
At UPMC, an integrated healthcare system with headquarters in Pittsburgh, new case managers spend time on the floor observing a case manager, go through classroom training, then work with a preceptor before going out on their own.
-
Theres no one size fits all for case management training, which means that hospitals need to create their own training and orientation process based on the specific responsibilities of the department, says Beverly Cunningham, RN, MS, vice president of resource management at Medical City Dallas Hospital. What is covered will vary from hospital to hospital, depending on the role of case management, she adds.
-
-
Once upon a time, new case managers received their training and orientation as they rotated through the case management department.
-
The use of a dedicated cleaning team to literally wipe out Clostridium difficile in occupied patient rooms lowered infection rates and left 93% of high touch surfaces negative on C. diff cultures, says Curtis Donskey, MD, staff physician at Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and an author of the study.
-
Whether through high-tech innovation or sheer elbow grease, reducing the bioburden of a host of pathogens in the health care environment is taking on unprecedented importance in infection prevention.
-
With strong evidence emerging that infection control interventions and pristine catheter care could prevent thousands of bloodstream infections annually in hemodialysis settings, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging freestanding and hospital-based dialysis centers to adopt its core collaborative measures nationally.