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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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Infection preventionists looking for guidance on discontinuing contact isolation for patients with multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MDR-Ab) remain in a quandary.
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Like a hurricane downgraded to a tropical depression, H1N1 influenza A has lost its pandemic status and is now just another troublesome flu bug as infection preventionists prepare for the annual outbreak season.
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In the increasingly litigious arena of infection prevention, juries are interpreting recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as "mandated" standards of care.
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With the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) opening preliminary rulemaking on a national infectious disease standard, infection preventionists pondering the end result of the effort may follow the old admonition, "look to California."
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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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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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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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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).