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Though conceding there is considerable evidence to support the use of active surveillance cultures (ASC) to detect patient colonization with antimicrobial-resistant pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the nation's leading infection prevention groups have come out jointly against mandating the practice through legislation.
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Hospitals and other medical facilities that do not use rapid HIV assays to test source patients after a blood exposure to a health care worker risk citations and fines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Hospital Infection Control has learned.
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A "tool kit" created by an expert panel on hospital infection reporting laws addresses the controversial issue of surgical site infections (SSIs), advising ICPs and state legislatures to focus tracking and reporting efforts on the most severe SSIs to ensure fair comparative data.
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As part of an increasing emphasis on patient empowerment and education, infection control professionals have seen arcane terms such as "nosocomial" de-emphasized in favor of clearer language.
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Physicians take an oath to do no harm to their patients. That covers not just life-and-death decisions, but the routine protections against infection. To emphasize that connection, Johanna Goldfarb, MD, head of pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital at The Cleveland Clinic, asks health care workers to take an oath to comply with hand hygiene.
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Pronovost and colleagues conducted a multi-hospital cohort study aimed at reducing the rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs) in ICUs. The intervention focused on increasing adherence to evidence-based CDC recommendations for catheter insertion. In summary, these are:
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A "tool kit" created by an expert panel on hospital infection reporting laws recommends that health care worker influenza vaccination rates be included as a quality measure and that workers refusing immunization be required to sign declination forms.
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The explosion of infection rate disclosure laws in recent years caught the health care epidemiology community so off guard, the metaphor used at many early meetings on the phenomenon was that "the train has left the station."
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In patients with M. Tuberculosis infection, the emergence of chromosomally mediated resistance to INH is a stochastic process, meaning it is the sum of the product of the spontaneous mutation rate (10-6) and the total bacterial load.