One of the greatest patient safety challenges is the prevention of hospital associated infections (HAI). According to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), surgical site infections (SSI) are the second most common HAI in U.S. Hospitals.1 SSIs related to…
This article appeared March 3 in the online edition of ADVANCE. 1. Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Guide to the Elimination of Orthopedic Surgical Site Infection. Washington, DC: APIC 2010. 2. Church N, Bjerke N. Surgical Services. In: Carrico R,…
About 1,660,290 new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2013, and approximately 580,350 Americans are projected to die of cancer. That’s almost 1,600 people a day.1 It has been estimated that each year, 60,000 cancer patients are hospitalized in the U.S. for…
This article appeared June 17 in the online edition of ADVANCE. 1. Heijne JCM, Teunis P, Morroy G, et al. Enhanced hygiene measures and norovirus transmission during an outbreak. Emerg Infect Dis. 2009;15(1):24-30. doi:10.3201/1501.080299. 2. Haill CF, Newell P, Ford C, et al. Compartmentalization of wards to cohort symptomatic patients at the…
Its transmission methods are multiple – fecal/oral route, person-to-person, touching contaminated objects, aerosolization! It doesn’t have a lipid envelope so alcohol and many detergents don’t kill it. It can live for 12 hours on hard surfaces and up to 12 days on fabrics. It…
In healthcare we put the knowledge we have learned to use each day. Many of us are on the front line, working in environments where resilient bacteria live and thrive. Among them is Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, which shows little or no sign of losing momentum…
The idea of double gloving during surgery seems to be catching on. Earlier this year, a 24-month study published in the AORN Journal found the majority of healthcare providers in the study expressed favorable views toward the practice of donning not one pair of gloves in…
This article appeared Feb. 27 in the online edition of ADVANCE. Trillis, F., et al. (2008). Contamination of hospital curtains with healthcare-associated pathogens. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 29(11), 1074-76 Ohl, M., et al. (2011). Hospital privacy curtains are frequently and rapidly contaminated with potentially pathogenic…
What’s wrong with this picture: a nurse enters a hospital room, does a thorough handwashing, pulls back the privacy curtains and attends to a patient? The hard-to-spot flaw in this scenario is that the nurse’s conscientious efforts at hand hygiene are compromised by one…
How sharp are your skills in identifying infection control violations? ADVANCE asked nurses at Beebe Medical Center, Lewes, DE, to create a room that would be an infection control nightmare. Beebe nurses put their heads together and staged an isolation room with 12 infection control no-no’s.…