Environmental Services

If having limited resources at your healthcare institution is forcing you to choose one key infection control-related intervention -- either hand hygiene or environmental hygiene -- to get the most return on investment, what would you select? Researchers have developed a model that can help infection preventionists, healthcare epidemiologists and administrators determine which strategies have a better pay-off from a patient safety perspective and can help guide resource-allocation decisions.

The world owes a debt of gratitude to Simon Fraser University biologist Regine Gries. Her arms have provided a blood meal for more than a thousand bed bugs each week for five years while she and her husband, biology professor Gerhard Gries, searched for a way to conquer the global bed bug epidemic. Working with SFU chemist Robert Britton and a team of students, they have finally found the solution -- a set of chemical attractants, or pheromones, that lure the bed bugs into traps and keep them there.

Xenex Disinfection Services announces that St. Cloud Surgical Center is the first ambulatory surgery center (ASC) in the U.S. and the first healthcare facility in St. Cloud to utilize a Xenex germ-zapping robot to enhance patient safety by destroying the deadly pathogens that can cause healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). St. Cloud Surgical Center is using Xenex’s full-spectrum UV disinfection system to disinfect its surgical suites daily.

Chlorine is a common disinfectant that is used to kill bacteria, for example in swimming pools and drinking water supplies. Our immune system also produces chlorine, which causes proteins in bacteria to lose their natural folding. These unfolded proteins then begin to clump and lose their function. Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) researchers headed by professor Lars Leichert have discovered a protein in the intestinal bacterium E. coli that protects bacteria from chlorine. In the presence of chlorine, it tightly bonds with other proteins, thus preventing them from coagulating. Once the danger has passed, it releases them again and the proteins can continue to work as usual. The researchers report their findings in the current issue of Nature Communications.

Proper and rigorous environmental cleaning in the long-term care facility (LTCF) can reap multiple benefits – it can help prevent infections, but it also can help ensure fewer environmental deficiencies during state and federal inspections and improve CMS ratings which helps make the facility a provider of choice. This Pulse summarizes cleaning and disinfection best practices in long-term care facilities.