MRSA and C difficile in a Children’s Hospital: Finding the Source

In this second of 2 videos in this series, Henry Spratt, Jr, Ph D, and David Levine, PT, PhD, DPT, CCRP, FAPTA continue their discussion with Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®) about the posters they presented at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) 2022 Annual Conference, held June 13-15, 2022, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Spratt is a professor at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Levine is a board-certified clinical specialist in orthopedic physical therapy emeritus, professor and Walter M. Cline Chair of Excellence in physical therapy, Department of Physical Therapy, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

The titles of their posters were “Bacterial Contamination of Floors in a Hematology/Oncology Unit in a Children’s Hospital” and “Surveillance of Staphylococci Presence in and Around Neonate Isolette Beds in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of a Children’s Hospital.”

The investigative team describe what future research they have planned and what they hope the attendees of APIC 2022 and the ICT®’s viewers retain from the posters they presented.

About the first poster, “Bacterial Contamination of Floors in a Hematology/Oncology Unit in a Children’s Hospital”, Spratt told ICT^®, “When we look at environmental contamination, it's such a wide open field, and outside of hospitals, when you think about a place like a prison, where there's a lot of close contact between individuals, [with] maybe not greatest sanitation at times, or you think of dormitories, community health centers, or assisted living centers, there could be probably 1000 groups that do what we do, and they would be kept busy.”

About the posters in general, Levine said, “One message is that we are constantly looking for new and better ways for monitoring and then eradicating potential pathogens in whatever area [health care workers] work in. And it's continuing to look at the new advances and share information…if people know about floors, they know about the different areas, it's the evolution of what we can do [to eradicate pathogens] and how it affects our patients.”

The first part of this series can be found here.