CDC Spreads Fight Against Antibiotic Overprescribing Over the World
December 9th 2021CDC’s Michael Craig: “Every country is an importer and an exporter of resistance…. And our hope is that this could be a jumpstart to help some of these countries start to build the capacity that is needed everywhere.”
Traceability: Challenges IPs Face Keeping an Instrument Decontaminated
November 24th 2021La’Titia Houston MPH, BSN, RN, CIC: “We work not only with the bedside nurses and the sterile processors, but even with our clinicians, our physicians. They want a timeout before the procedure is even performed because they want to ensure that the scope did pass during the high-level disinfection procedure.”
Animal Kingdom: COVID-19 Has So Many Hosts to Choose From
November 22nd 2021Kevin Kavanagh, MD: “The deer apparently live with COVID-19 quite well, but, yet rapidly spread it amongst the herds. And that’s actually very problematic, because if it finds a host that it doesn’t make sick, but yet it can mutate and change and then reinfect other animals and plus mankind, that is one of the worrisome scenarios that could take place.”
How IPs Can Better Monitor Sterilization, Disinfection
November 4th 2021Crystal Heishman, MBA, MSN, RN, ONC, CIC: “You don’t ever want to go into a sterilization department and say, ‘You’re doing this wrong’. Because they’re the subject matter experts. You want to learn. You want to learn the process. You want to work together because it makes a stronger partnership.”
Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Normal, IPs
November 3rd 2021Doe Kley, RN, CIC, MPH,T-CHEST: “We just can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing with our singular focus on one pathogen. We know that while we were doing that—while we were so busy with COVID-19—other really dangerous and emerging pathogens got a foothold. The one that scares me the most is Candida auris.”
Environmental Services Workers Need to be Certified
November 2nd 2021Darrel Hicks: “EVS teams work around professionals who are certified—whether it’s respiratory therapists, physical therapists, the RNs, the doctors—and I think if we ever hoped to elevate their status that we need to certify environmental services workers to a certain level of knowledge before they even start cleaning patient rooms.”
Delta Variant of COVID-19 Will Burn Itself Out
October 22nd 2021Jason Tetro, author of The Germ Code: “Moving forward, I think we’re going to be going into this idea of seasonality, or as I like to say, cold, flu and COVID-19 seasons.” And the so-called "monster variant"? It's already here, says Tetro. It's called Delta.
Troubled Water Makes for Sick Hospitals
October 18th 2021Brian Flannigan: “The reason why water quality and water safety is so important in sterile processing is that there have been direct connections made between the water systems and hospital infections: operating room infections, asset life problems, maintenance problems, staining and discoloration of equipment.”
Why COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Are Necessary
October 18th 2021Anthony Harris, MD, MBA, MPH: “We know that mandates such [as the COVID-19 vaccine mandate] don’t exist in isolation. For any school age child that wants to attend public school, guess what? Be vaccinated. Likewise for universities, in many cases. If you’re living in a dormitory scenario. This is not a far cry from precedent that’s already been set.”
Compassion Fatigue? Talk About It
September 24th 2021Rebecca Leach, MPH, BSN, RN, CIC: “[Compassion fatigue is] a hard topic for us because we’re not used to talking about this kind of thing in infection prevention. We’re very much focused on evidence-based care and standards. And so, this delves into a little bit of dealing with our emotions, right? And in health care, we don’t talk about that kind of thing.”
CDC Epidemiologist Discusses Sepsis, COVID-19 Link
September 17th 2021The CDC’s Runa Gokhale, MD, MPH: “I think that there is a role for infection preventionists to play here, and they are a community that we’ve been trying to engage through some of our sepsis awareness and sepsis prevention efforts.”
Approaches to Curing Racial, Ethnic Inequality in Health Care
August 7th 2021G. Rumay Alexander, EdD, RN: “When experience shows up, it speaks and it speaks loudly. It usually shows up as a feeling, or a thought, or a belief, or a decision about who’s worthy of getting the best care, or the minimum amount.”