Hospital Employee Health – May 1, 2024

Healthcare Workers, CDC at Odds Over COVID Precautions

Inundated with criticism from healthcare workers, highly vulnerable patients, and those with long COVID, advisors to the CDC must make a Solomonic decision. At a time when the CDC is trying to simplify and normalize community precautions for SARS-CoV-2, initial efforts to do so in the hospital have backfired spectacularly.

Is Measles Elimination Status at Risk? Antivaxers Attack MMR Vaccine

As the number of measles cases in the United States already has outstripped total cases for last year, employee health professionals should prepare for incoming cases that can wreak havoc in a hospital if undetected. Even if staff are fully immunized, all bets are off if an undiagnosed case of measles gets into a healthcare facility.

An Old Pro Stays in the Fight Against Needlesticks

At age 78, with more than 50 years of clinical consultation and research on needlesticks, sharps injuries, and medical waste, Terry Grimmond, FASM, BAgrSc, GrDpAdEdTr, says he retired at the end of 2023 but is still winding his career down with a few final projects.

‘I Need My Brain!’: Horrors of Long COVID in HCWs

A systematic review of studies on healthcare workers who experienced long COVID in the United Kingdom revealed that many struggled to separate their clinical identity from that of a patient. Healthcare workers with various symptoms of long COVID endured over different lengths of time recognized the uncertainty of their symptoms of this poorly understood syndrome and feared they would be perceived as a burden.