The Infection Control Today® health care-acquired infections (HAIs) page presents updates on the latest techniques and strategies in the never-ending battle between infection preventionists and HAIs. Focusing on the latest in medical literature, we also present perspectives from the top infection preventionists and other medical experts in the country about how to put the growing knowledge of HAIs into use in the everyday world of infection prevention. Articles and videos often focus on methods to contain and control pathogens and multidrug-resistant organisms from spreading within the health care system.
November 21st 2024
The Leapfrog Group enhances hospital safety by publicizing hand hygiene performance, improving patient safety outcomes, and significantly reducing health care-associated infections through transparent standards and monitoring initiatives.
November 4th 2024
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.”
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.”
Battling HAIs: A Primer for Infection Preventionists
October 30th 2021In order of occurrence, the most common types of HAIs are catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) at 32%; surgical site infection (SSI) at 22%; pneumonia (ventilator-associated pneumonia) at 15%; and central-line associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) at 14%.
How Hospital Administrators Can Help IPs Manage HAIs
October 15th 2021If we want to see sustained improvements in our hospitals, administrators must step in and visibly show their support of IPs while investing their time, resources, and hospital funding to increase the capacity of the IPC department.
As HAIs Rise, New Methods of Counterattack Sought
October 14th 2021Even the most rigorous infection prevention protocols come unraveled if compliance isn’t maintained. The challenge is that for busy health care professionals, remembering when and how to disinfect is just one of many competing tasks in an extremely busy day.
How to Improve Nursing Home Antibiotic Stewardship Programs
September 29th 2021The CDC’s Katryna Gouin, MPH: “…[I]deally tracking antibiotic use at the facility level should be automated using either electronic health records or long-term care pharmacy dispensing data because manual tracking of antibiotics is time intensive.”
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.”