Infection Control Today, May 2021 (Vol. 25 No.4)

During this time, as hospital case counts drop, IPs are expected to just switch back to normal while still ensuring a readiness to respond to COVID-19.

COVID-19 helped to speed up adoption of telehealth. When it comes to telehealth platforms, though, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach.

Nurses need a seat at the table when discussing PPE stockpiling and purchasing practices to share their lived experiences and help the team discover where practice deviated from plans. Infection preventionists should support the nurses in these discussions as allies.

IPs and other health care professionals needed to improvise. That improvisation led to investigations into how many times an N95 can be reused and still keep SARS- CoV-2 at bay.

The infection prevention and business intelligence teams at Piedmont Healthcare put their heads together to streamline the process of tracking health care-acquired infections.

The multidisciplinary team included NICU nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners and, perhaps most important of all, environmental services personnel. “We met with the environmental services staff, and we explained to them that this is a critical situation in the neonatal ICU. And this cannot spread more.”

When outbreaks have been reported in hospitals that are using universal masking, unmasked exposure to other health care workers is often the cause. Transmissions have been traced to break rooms and cafeterias.

The FDA wants providers to know about “contamination issues associated with reprocessing urological endoscopes, including cystoscopes, ureteroscopes and cystourethroscopes—devices used to view and access the urinary tract.”

Even assuming that up to 75% of people testing positive wouldn’t follow isolation guidance, the tests would greatly curtail infection, hospitalization, and death, argue investigators. The cost to the health care system would be worth it, investigators say.

No deadline was given for when these goals should be reached and some of the data to be used will depend on hospitals voluntarily releasing their numbers to the CDC.

The shape and material composition of the N95 respirators varied widely from manufacturer to manufacturer, which can result in variations in the efficacy of a particular method from one product to the next.

Investigators conclude that asymptomatic carriers increased the duration of the pandemic. Every patient should be tested for COVID-19.

Tanya Lewis, CRCST: “I just think that infection preventionists and sterile processors should always work as a team. It should always be a team effort. It’s not them or us. It’s not sterile processing. It’s not infection prevention, but it’s us as a team. And that’s the way we’re going to keep our patients safe.”