Hospital Infection Control & Prevention
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Joint Commission: If You Create Infection Control Policy, Make Sure You Follow It
If infection preventionists adopt or write up an infection control policy — even if it goes beyond existing recommendations and requirements — The Joint Commission will cite or “score” them if the hospital is not following it. Do not put in word what you will not follow in deed, said Sylvia Garcia-Houchins, MBA, RN, CIC, director of infection prevention and control at The Joint Commission.
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Incentivizing New Antibiotics to Kill Multidrug-Resistant Bugs
Bacteria have developed resistance to so many antibiotics that a familiar adage about these lifesaving drugs is “use ’em and lose ’em.” Ideas to break this cycle and create a market for new antibiotics include the proposed PASTEUR (Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Upsurging Resistance) Act of 2023, which has been reintroduced in Congress.
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Necessity and Reinvention: APIC Tries to Hire, Retain IPs
As a generation of infection preventionists (IPs) near career end, it is well to remember that many of them tell a similar story of how they got into the profession. Often, they were working some other clinical job and an opening or temporary need came up in the infection control department. To paraphrase what Hospital Infection Control & Prevention has reported time and again from new IPs to long-established leaders in the field, “I just fell into it and I loved it. I found it fascinating.”
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CDC Recommends RSV Vaccine for Patients in Third Trimester
The agency says this solution should be administered to patients during weeks 32 through 36 of pregnancy to protect babies against the dangerous virus, both before and shortly after birth.
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CAUTIs: What to Do, What Not to Do
New compendium recommendations by the nation’s leading infection control groups on catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) emphasize that, in most cases, screening for asymptomatic bacteriuria does more harm than good.
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What Is in Your Laundry? The Threat of Mucormycosis
Even pressed and folded, so-called “hygienically clean” hospital laundry can harbor fungal pathogens, sometimes in sufficient number to cause fatal mucormycosis infections in high-risk patients, outbreak investigators reported at the 2023 conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
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Misinformation: The Many-Headed Hydra
Social media platforms have become the Wild West of misinformation, and current indications suggest this is going to continue and possibly expand, said Donna Nucci, RN, MS, CIC, director of infection prevention, Yale New Haven Health.
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Burning Down the House: Climate Change Drives Emerging Infections
The connection between emerging infections and climate change has gone from theoretical discussions in the past few years to an evidence-based phenomenon happening in real time. That said, there are multiple converging factors, and attributing all emerging infections to global warming is too broad a stroke to explain a complex issue.
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CDC Publishes Guide to Help Hospitals Diagnose, Treat Sepsis
The agency details seven pillars upon which leaders can build a successful program.
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U.S. Public Health Officials Warn Frontline Providers to Watch for Malaria Cases
Clinicians should raise their suspicion levels for the mosquito-borne illness when patients present with fever with an unknown etiology, even if the patients have not traveled recently to a country where malaria is endemic.