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One good housekeeper can prevent more diseases than a dozen doctors can cure. Some patients are so ill that a healthcare-associated infection (HAI) can take a patients life, even if there were a room full of doctors to provide treatment. Just as medical personnel care for patients, environmental services (ES) professionals work to keep hospitals healthy. This article is a nuts-and-bolts piece meant to improve the health of healthcare facilities. There are a few basic things we need to do to make ES departments effective -- proper hiring and training of staff, adequate design of ES work areas, accurate appraisal of task loads, and concise time management of the frontline staff.

A little information can go a surprisingly long way when it comes to understanding rodent-borne infectious disease, as shown by a new study led by John Orrock from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To understand where clinical microbiology is going in the future, it's helpful to take a quick trip back in history. Years ago, the Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control project established the scientific basis for claims of efficacy of hospital-acquired infection surveillance and control programs, and the importance of clinical microbiology laboratories (CMLs) was emphasized. (Scheckler, 1998).