News

New guidelines from the National Health Safety Network (NHSN) are changing the way hospitals report ventilator-associated events, including complications and pneumonia, says Linda R. Greene, RN, MPS, CIC, a member of the board for the Association for Professionals in Infection Control (APIC). She was also a member of the CDC working group that helped shape the current surveillance definition algorithm for reporting VAEs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports historically high levels of Clostridium difficile infections in healthcare settings, attributing around 14,000 patient deaths each year to the hospital-acquired infection. Those at the most risk are elderly people who are in the hospital and on antibiotics. Antimicrobial stewardship programs multidisciplinary efforts to measure and regulate the use of antimicrobials are key to helping healthcare organizations reduce the risk of encountering multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) like C. diff.

C. Tod Brindle and Jacob A. Wegelin have won the clinical research manuscript of the year award from the Journal of Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nursing for their pioneering work on the use of foam dressings to prevent pressure ulcers.

A new system could tell you how likely it is for you to become ill if you visit a particular restaurant by 'listening' to the tweets from other restaurant patrons.

A new pitfall trap designed to capture bed bugs is more effective than those currently on the market, according to the authors of an article appearing in the next issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. The authors also found that traps baited with an experimental chemical lure mixture caught 2.2 times as many bed bugs as traps without the lure. Their findings suggest that an effective and affordable bed bug monitor can be made incorporating the new pitfall trap design, a chemical lure, and a sugar-and-yeast mixture to produce carbon dioxide, which is also known to attract bed bugs.

An aging population is swelling the ranks of long-term care (LTC) residents in this country, and the need is greater than ever for the implementation of infection prevention and control in these facilities. Barriers to good practice are numerous for both the frontline healthcare worker and the infection preventionist (IP), but these can be combated with the right skill sets and knowledge, emphasizes Gail Bennett, RN, MSN, CIC, of Rome, Ga.-based ICP Associates, Inc. who has spent many years consulting to LTC facilities and health systems across the country and who was a co-author of the SHEA/APIC guideline on infection prevention and control in the long-term care facility.

Hospitals constantly struggle to combat hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). In recent years, the development and use of rapid diagnostic testing for these infectious diseases has helped to alleviate some of the issue, allowing healthcare providers to screen patients at the point of admission and take necessary precautions for carriers. Hospitals also want to know this information as quickly as possible in order to document infections. They do not receive additional payments for conditions that were not present at the time of admission, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website.