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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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Your influenza vaccination campaign is coming into the public spotlight, and that means more pressure than ever on the logistics of administering and tracking those vaccinations.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's rapidly expanding National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) has long been the gold standard surveillance system for health care associated infections (HAIs).
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A compounding-pharmacy assessment tool developed by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) can provide critical guidance for hospitals in the wake of the national meningitis outbreak.
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"By the time we learned this was a problem around the country, the information from Tennessee had already narrowed it down to what the problem was. [It was] a textbook case of how to do it right." Paul Jarris, MD, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
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A common question in clinical practice about the shingles vaccine is whether it is effective in preventing recurrent episodes in patients who have had herpes zoster (HZ).
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Young women in two primary care clinics in Ohio who were from 13 to 26 years of age with a history of sexual contact were studied using a sequential sampling strategy in a pre-vaccination HPV surveillance study from 2006-2007 and in a postvaccination surveillance study from 2009-2010. Cervicovaginal swabs were genotyped for HPV using PCR amplification techniques.
