-
If you're thinking pertussis is the cause of a respiratory outbreak in your hospital or community, think twice.
-
A controversial health care worker screening provision in a recently enacted Pennsylvania law was intended as compromise language that would appease the governor's office while giving hospitals flexibility in complying, a state legislative official tells Hospital Infection Control.
-
The emergence of two new strains of norovirus has resulted in increased reports of hospital and long-term care outbreaks, some of which appear to involve the first fatal infections with the virus reported in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
-
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) decision to halt payment on additional costs generated by certain infections could unleash a series of unintended consequences such as increased testing and possible inappropriate treatment for hospital patients on admission, a health care epidemiologist warns.
-
While praiseworthy, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) decision to halt payment on additional costs generated by certain infections should have gone further and included methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a consumer advocacy group argues.
-
For the fist time since The Joint Commission began keeping records of sentinel events in 1996, wrong-site surgery has reached the No. 1 position over patient suicide in terms of cumulative data. There have been 552 reports of wrong-site surgery, yet it is viewed as an event that often is underreported.
-
Do you and your staff have an extra 55 hours a year? That's the amount of time the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that you and your ambulatory surgery center (ASC) staff would spend complying with new and revised Conditions for Coverage (CfC) for ASCs.
-
Compliance with The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) 3 in 2008 will require accredited organizations to pay close attention to their assessment and monitoring of patients who are on anticoagulation therapy.
-
You have switched from razors to clippers to remove hair, you developed strict, scientifically based protocols for administration of prophylactic antibiotics, and your staff scrub their hands in the proper manner. Although all of these steps reduce the risk of infection in the operating room, have you checked your staff's nails?
-
Patient safety goals and all standards related to patient safety top the list of items focused upon by The Joint Commission surveyors, according to outpatient managers surveyed during recent months.
