While hospital ICUs have made significant strides in reducing central line associated blood stream infections, hemodialysis settings remain a dangerous area for patient care. Some 37,000 bloodstream infections occur each year among dialysis patients with central lines, posing a risk…
Health care workers may be suffering in silence from work-related dermatitis, much of it linked to frequent hand washing. Cases of work-related dermatitis are about 100 times greater than the rate reflected in federal data, and health care workers are…
Norovirus has become a common scourge, generally perceived as an extremely disruptive but self-limiting nuisance. There is another aspect of this emerging virus that has been somewhat overshadowed: It is a “debilitating and life-threatening infection in immunosuppressed patients,” researchers report.1…
The world has dirty hands, but who is trying to do anything about? Well, the World Health Organization for one, which has designated May 5, 2012 an international day of hand hygiene observance. The 5th day of the 5th month…
Sorry for the technical problems and various glitches, but we appear able to blog again and blog we shall. Whether this is perception or reality, we’ll find out shortly. Having stopped the leaks, so to speak, we look to history…
“Big Brother is Watching You,” wrote George Orwell in his classic cautionary novel 1984. The increasingly high-tech solutions to the historic problem of hand hygiene (HH) compliance raise this familiar specter, as health care workers are being tagged, badged, beeped,…
With historical hand hygiene compliance rates typically in the 50% range, infection preventionists have tried multiple interventions that include a vast array of signs and messages in an attempt to change the behavior of health care workers. Can one word…
Health care workers who want to “do the right thing” must be supported by a culture change that recognizes infection prevention as a system problem that warrants a system solution, said Elaine Larson, PhD, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic Research…
It is encouraging to see the spontaneous, creative combustion that seems to be occurring everywhere in the area of hand hygiene improvement. The bane of infection prevention is no longer accepted with unwashed hands thrown in the air. Rather,…
I am not aware of any study that shows that Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is more difficult than susceptible staph strains to deactivate and remove by hand washing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that health care workers…