April 11th 2024
A JAMA study exposes the US healthcare system's staggering waste expenditure underlining challenges in managing diverse waste types and stringent regulations' compliance. What solutions are there?
February 29th 2024
Q&A: What Infection Preventionists Learned from COVID
October 28th 2020Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC: “I’m hoping that healthcare facilities will find the value in their infection preventionists and understand how important a role they play as far as training on PPE and disinfectants, and in hand hygiene, being kind of a boots on the ground people on the floor to see things firsthand.”
Fauci: Wear a Mask Even When COVID Vaccine Comes
October 26th 2020Fauci: “While results of phase 3 trials for multiple candidate vaccines are on the near horizon, ‘low-tech’ tools to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 are essential, and it must be emphasized that these interventions will still be needed after a vaccine is initially available.”
Infection Preventionists, Get Ready for New COVID Waves
October 16th 2020It can be helpful for infection preventionists to still provide quick COVID-19 rounds in units and high-risk areas like emergency departments and urgent care clinics. These can be as simple as 30-minute reviews of personal protective equipment, isolation precautions, and communication pathways.
Infection Preventionist Guide for Dealing With Flu and COVID-19
August 26th 2020If you see something, say something. Let coworkers know when they may have breached infection control practices such as forgetting to wash their hands, not wearing PPE properly, or missed opportunities to clean a high-touch surfaces.
Q&A: Getting Healthcare Workers to Wear Masks
August 19th 2020Linda Spaulding: “We [infection preventionists] have listening sessions with staff and we talked to them about proper mask wearing 24/7. We can do a listening session and we still have people sitting there with a mask under their nose, while we’re telling them not to. You have to continuously stress this among healthcare workers, be it whatever department.”
Neck Gaiters for COVID-19 Worse Than No Face Covering At All
August 17th 2020Neck gaiters weren’t the only face coverings tested: in all 14 were analyzed, from N95s (unsurprisingly judged to be the most effective in containing COVID-19 spread) to bandanas (not much more effective then neck gaiters, according to the study).
Best N95 Training: Watch, Learn, Then Do While Being Watched
August 13th 2020Film healthcare workers as they don and doff N95s, show that video to participants (explaining where they got it right, and where they got it wrong), and then have the participants don and doff again with more input from trainers.
What Happened When COVID-19 Visited A Hair Salon
July 22nd 2020We have much work to do in terms of risk communication and awareness. This is a good example of how quickly exposures can happen in the workplace when we focus only on employee-to-customer interactions or healthcare worker-to-patient interactions.
Q&A: Nearly All Healthcare Workers Fighting COVID-19 Need N95s
July 14th 2020Harry Peled, MD: “I think for administrators and infection control people, the attitude has to be there is enough evidence that the wearing of N95s should be official. The claim that we’re going to wait for perfect evidence is just not tenable. We don’t do that for anything else in medicine.”
Don’t Be Fooled: CDC Website Posts Photos of Counterfeit N95 Masks
April 21st 2020Lives are at stake and counterfeit N95 respirators make things worse for infection preventionists and others trying to care for COVID-19 patients. If you suspect that something being billed as an N95 is fake, report it to the CDC.
Nurses Suspended After Refusing to Work Without N95 Masks, but Hospital Now Accedes to Demands
April 16th 2020National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, declared victory because hospital administrators “announced that health care workers throughout the Providence system will be issued N95 respirator masks to wear when caring for COVID positive or potentially COVID positive patients…,” according to a press release issued by the unions.
A Q&A With Linda Spaulding on the Frontlines of COVID-19
April 15th 2020"We have to be comfortable with the fact that we have to reuse PPE for multiple patients. But one of the things they have to remember is those multiple patients all have the same illness. So, it’s not like we’re going to transfer multi-drug resistant organism to the next patient. Because we try not to use the same PPE for those situations."