Environmental Services

As a 35-year veteran of environmental services, Scott Hedding, MBA, FACHE, the system director of environmental services for Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, Wis., understands fully the critical role that his department plays in patient safety and infection prevention. He champions the 500 environmental services professionals that are in the 1,700-bed Aurora Health Care system, driving home the importance of quality improvement, personnel engagement in that process, and personal accountability for keeping patients safe and free from infection. Hedding shares his perspectives on motivating and leading his staff and introducing best practices and new products into existing programs and protocols successfully.

There are many reasons why bed bugs have made a comeback in recent decades, and their resistance to commonly used insecticides is one of the most widely accepted explanations. In a new paper published in the Journal of Economic Entomology, scientists from the University of Sydney and NSW Health Pathology describe how bed bugs are able to resist pyrethroid insecticides via metabolic detoxification, the process by which bed bugs break down insecticides.

Efficacy of hospital-grade cleaners and disinfectants is one of the most widely scrutinized aspects of surface disinfection, yet this factor could be undermined by the lesser-known obstacle of materials compatibility -- how cleaning and disinfection chemistries interact with the materials from which healthcare equipment and surfaces are manufactured.

In order to determine where bed bug outbreaks are occurring and the best way to prevent and control infestations, entomologists examined 2,372 apartments in New Jersey and looked at factors such as the age, race, and gender of the inhabitants. The results are published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

The human microbiome, a diverse collection of microorganisms living inside us and on our skin, has attracted considerable attention for its role in a broad range of human health issues. Now, researchers are discovering that the built environment also has a microbiome, which includes a community of potentially-pathogenic bacteria living inside water supply pipes.

This case study explores how St. Mary's Health Care System in Athens, Ga. was the first healthcare institution in northeast Georgia to use UV light to treat high-utilization areas as an adjunct strategy to drive down their rates of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

The very thought of them makes a person shudder - and scratch. Those bloodsucking bed bugs are endemic in every major city, and they're very hard to get rid of. A massive international research partnership - including the University of Cincinnati - has sequenced the entire genome of the common bed bug, uncovering several traits that also could reveal why they're so resistant to pesticides. The article is one of two papers sequencing the bed bug gene that is published this month in the journal Nature Communications.