Frank Diamond

Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC: “It is a collaboration, and I think the most successful environmental services department has an infection preventionist who really enjoys working with EVS.”

Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC: “It is a collaboration, and I think the most successful environmental services department has an infection preventionist who really enjoys working with EVS.”

Decontaminated respirators should only be resorted to when unused devices are not available, but that happened a lot in the last few months.

Rebecca Leach, RN, BSN, MPH, CIC: “Infection preventionists had to work very closely with our supply chain and look at all of our options and really keep track of it. I also think working with lab more closely will be important in the future, to understand testing modalities, understanding our abilities to test and interpreting those tests.”

Most likely the COVID death count of nursing homes will mount as more information comes to light, as only about 80% of the nation’s approximately 15,400 nursing homes have reported their data.

The wearing of cloth masks doesn’t mean that employees should stop following social distancing guidelines. In fact, social distancing guidelines must be followed at all times.

Deborah Chung: “With the 40% of healthcare workers wanting better hand hygiene training pre-COVID, I can only assume that’s been exponentially surged.”

Kevin Kavangh, MD: “What worries me the most about reopening is that people going to say, ‘Oh, it’s over with’ and not do any sort of protection, whether it’s social distancing, wearing masks, not gathering in crowds. I really think that people will think, ‘Well, we got this beat.’”

Jason Tetro: “When healthcare leaders are meeting, I think that they’re going to listen to infection preventionists much more than they have in the past.”

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are some of the most vulnerable pathogens to the microbicidal agents in many detergents and cleaning solutions, including soaps for personal care and liquid hand washes. 

Katherine Perez, PharmD: “For patients with COVID-19, I think the jury’s still out as to how we should be using antibiotics in those patients and what the risk of a secondary bacterial infection truly is. And that type of information has not been made available, at least not in huge amounts at this time.”

Jeffrey Rose: “I think the desire to break apart some of the functionality of the hospital and spread it out into other facilities-like oncology centers or ambulatory surgery centers-to reduce the large population at one building, is going to continue to grow. And in addition, if you design them correctly, you can use those facilities for surge capacity.”

While starting to perform elective surgeries, hospitals should also keep an eye COVID-19 in their communities and have the resources available to respond to a surge in COVID patients without having to resort to a crisis standard of care.

Both donning and doffing are carefully laid out, but it’s the doffing part of the procedure that might present the most challenge because it involves the discarding of some of the PPE in a manner that most limits the chance of self-contamination or contaminating someone else. 

Charles Gerba, PhD: Environmental services plays a crucial-and often unsung-role in infection prevention. “Unfortunately, we don’t honor people enough for things they prevented or that never happened.”

Daniel F. Shay, Esq.: “COVID-19 is not the last infectious disease that we’re going to encounter…. I think that there are good reasons to use telemedicine to the extent that you can reduce the risk to healthcare practitioners, healthcare professionals, and also to other patients, and, frankly, the general populace.”

Not only did nurse managers feel responsible for the levels of hand hygiene adherence on their wards, but that attitude extended to general standards of infection prevention.

Yi Guo, PharmD: “I think one thing that we learned is to work closely with the infection control preventionists because when we discovered the patient has multidrug resistant bacteria, we want to make sure the appropriate isolation policy is in place.”

Start out with brief non-urgent telemedicine encounters; get the patients used to the process.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to the Abbott ID Now test on March 27.

"We had to everyday kind of make some changes. Every morning there were huddles and we tried to figure it out."

The media, public health officials, and politicians are accused of being too quick to find fault with nursing home providers.

COVID-19 testing capabilities would have to increase by at least 211% in order for hospitals and other healthcare facilities to resume providing elective procedures and diagnostic services.

Investigators say that they identified 14 mutations that affect the spikes on SARS-CoV-2.

Mary Jean Ricci, MSN, RN-BC: "Now we’re looking at [infection prevention] from a global perspective. Every patient needs to be educated because this is a novel virus and it is unknown."

Ideally, link nurses increase awareness of infection control issues and motivate colleagues to improve in that regard, keeping patients and themselves safer by limiting the spread of HAIs.  

Brent James, MD: "As soon as you get a health plan involved, it’s all about the money. Turns out that when you reduce infection rates, nearly always that reduces the cost of health care. It takes an investment to make that happen, though. Quality is not free." 

Face shields are durable and can be cleaned and reused repeatedly, thereby eliminating the problem of shortages.

"Operation Warp Speed" seeks to develop and disburse 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to the public by year’s end.

Because of the shortage of N95 masks, surgical masks have been used. But they don't offer nearly the same protection.