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The American Health Lawyers Association (AHLA) guidelines on disclosure of serious adverse clinical events (SACEs) are an excellent compendium of all the issues that should be raised, says Ellen L. Janos, JD, an attorney with the law firm of Mintz Levin in Boston who often has helped hospitals make decisions regarding disclosure of adverse events.
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News: A 32-year-old pregnant woman presented to the hospital on Aug. 14, 2005, due to onset of labor. At 9:30 a.m., the fetal heart rate monitor showed a dangerous drop in the babys heart rate from 140 beats per minute to 60 beats per minute.
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Infectious disease societies frustrated at watching antimicrobial resistance increase for decades are taking the unusual step of asking for federal regulation and oversight of clinical practice, imploring the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to require hospitals to implement antimicrobial stewardship programs.
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A new multicenter study shows that antimicrobial stewardship expressed as a post-prescription review and feedback intervention can decrease antimicrobial use, especially when it's part of an established antimicrobial program.
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Investigators evaluating more than 240 patients over a three-month period found that infectious diseases (ID) physicians correctly identified patients who did not need to be discharged on community-based parenteral anti-infective therapy (CoPAT).
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Norovirus is the organism most likely to trigger a shutdown of units in your hospital. And according to a recent survey of infection preventionists, it is responsible for more outbreaks than some deadlier organisms, such as Clostridium difficile and Staphylococcus aureus.
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In yet another sign that infection control is becoming a national priority across a wide range of accreditors, regulators and state and federal agencies, the Joint Commission has created a new web portal to combine its full array of initiatives to prevent health care associated infections (HAIs).
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In addition to calling for federal regulation requiring antimicrobial stewardship, a position paper by leading infectious disease groups recommended several other measures to preserve remaining antibiotic efficacy.
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The question of gown use when entering patient isolation rooms is a recurrent one, so it is worth noting that this is the current thinking of the Joint Commission on the subject:
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Researchers are finding a systemic problem involving the unnecessary use of IV fluoroquinolones in the acute care wards of hospitals. While the data came from 128 Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals, the research suggests this is a trend that all health care systems should address through antimicrobial stewardship programs.
