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Memo to the Centers from Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from two leading surgeons on the literal cutting edge of infection prevention in the OR: Hospitals and federal regulators should encourage the use of newer and safer types of surgery and more transparency with patients on procedure options and possible outcomes. That would do more to reduce surgical site infection (SSI) rates than inspections by CMS and other government regulators.
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As the lines blur between patient safety and worker safety, employee health professionals including those "two-hat" infection preventionists with dual responsibilities can expect much more scrutiny from regulators who traditionally focused on patient care.
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Recently I've chosen a major change in job responsibilities. For the second time I'm the sole Infection Preventionist (IP) for a facility, but this time the realm of 'Quality' is included, and my facility is a 32-bed surgical hospital including a four-bed ICU. It was time to challenge myself to keep learning new approaches to age-old problems surrounding patient safety. Talk about moving out of the comfort zone!
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to develop an infection control survey slated for use in the nation's hospitals later this year, using expert feedback and "pre-testing" results from the field to create a 42-page tool that assesses a wide breadth of program issues.
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The Veterans Health Administration has developed best practices in handling large-scale epidemiologic look-back investigations, including finding a way to explain a potential exposure of blood-borne viruses to a large number of people who likely were not impacted by the incident.
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The authors performed a randomized, single-blind trial of the effects of a paracervical block (PCB) or sham block on pain with cervical dilation and aspiration during first trimester abortion. Enrollment of subjects was stratified by gestational age (early: < 8 weeks, n = 60; late: 8-10 6/7 weeks, n = 60).
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For years, clinicians have been trying to find ways to predict shoulder dystocia (SD), a complication that can have serious consequences for some infants and, on occasion, for the providers who delivered these babies.
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To investigate the attitudes and practices of health care providers toward intrauterine device (IUD) use in nulliparous women, the authors performed a national survey of both office-based physicians and Title X health care providers from December 2009 to March 2010.
