HAIs

Meri Pearson, MPH, CIC: “Infection preventionists still need to do those active audits to make sure that they’re actually seeing what’s happening at the bedside.”

The number of syphilis cases in 2000 raised hopes that it could be eradicated, but since 2015 cases have risen 74%.

The lessons infection preventionists at the University of Mississippi Medical Center learned from an outbreak of respiratory illness at the facility’s NICU in 2019, were later used to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ultraviolet light should be used in concert with traditional cleaning and disinfection procedures utilized by environmental services teams, study’s author maintains.

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

Emilie Bédard, PhD: “We worked in collaboration with infection prevention, environmental services…. We had a multi-disciplinary team to make sure that we would look at all aspects of this approach.”

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.”

The study comes at a time when—despite all the attention and health care resources being thrown at COVID-19—medical experts have begun to turn a wary eye toward bacteriological pathogens.

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.

Priya Nori, MD: “The immediate thing that the health care industry has to grapple with, even as COVID hopefully starts to settle down after the mass vaccination campaign … [will be] superbugs.”

Evidence shows that bacteria on floors can be resuspended into the air with a potential of inhalation, swallowing, or contamination of surfaces and hands.

Arjun Srinivasan, MD: “There’s a lot of potential for synergy between the infection prevention program and the antibiotic stewardship program.”

Investigators propose that their simulation models can be used in educating nurses and other health care professionals about how best to maintain good hand hygiene, and also where best to put alcohol-based hand disinfectants.

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.

That an entirely new outbreak of Ebola would be triggered by a latent infection 5 to 6 years after the initial infection is deeply worrisome.

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

This may not be the best time to ask, “What’s next?” But…what’s next? What pathogen(s) not called COVID-19 should we be most concerned about? And where will it (they) be coming from?

Investigators wanted to see how their method would fare against Acinetobacter baumannii and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and results were promising.

Linda Spaulding RN, BC, CIC, CHEC, CHOP: “Infection preventionists need to learn how to clean an endoscope, or at least observe the cleaning…. Infection preventionists need to make rounds, they need to talk to the person processing.”

Maureen Vowles: “I think that the relationship between infection preventionists and public health is key to the success of preventing CRAB and other multi-drug resistant organisms.”

Though tough months lie ahead for infection preventionists and other healthcare professionals, hope remains that at some point in 2021 things will begin to settle down. In the end, it comes down to a simple formula: We win, COVID-19 loses.

Infection preventionists can work with environmental services (EVS) leadership to implement a routine practice for quality assurance checks that EVS leadership can follow. These metrics can then be reviewed as an aggregate with the IP department to target whether further education may be beneficial.

At this point, since 2014, we all have improved our ability to respond to and prevent emerging infectious diseases, so why not make this practice a permanent part of infection control and not just one that comes up ad hoc?

When an 850-bed urban hospital fought off COVID-19 in part by having to relax infection prevention protocols, the opportunistic and deadly carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) struck.

CRAB has chameleon-like tendencies that allow it to absorb material from other organisms, and that allows it to ward off most antibiotics. It’s a Superbug.