Patient falls are often associated with elderly patients, but as one hospital experienced firsthand, postpartum women recovering in the obstetrics room can also be at risk.
Imagine a patient is admitted to your hospital from a trauma unit. A history is taken, multiple staff members evaluate her, and she is brought up to the inpatient unit. There, staff are hands on, helping her to walk to the bathroom and focusing on getting her better. She...
Like Franklin Woods Community Hospital (see p. 7), Sycamore Shoals Hospital (SSH) in Elizabethton, Tenn., a Mountain States Health Alliance hospital, is a participant in the QUEST collaborative. And like its sister hospital, SSH has achieved impressive results. Specifically, it...
A podcast from The Joint Commission on key learnings from the SSI Change Project and The Joint Commission Implementation Guide for NPSG 07.05.01 is available on The Joint Commission Website. Click the link above for more information.
If a member of the voluntary medical staff is exposed to a communicable disease while caring for a patient at your facility, do you have any responsibility and what is it?
Loyola University Medical Center endured its share of objections from healthcare workers who did not want to be vaccinated against influenza. But it has found a way to convince nearly everyone on staff to get the flu shot.
Hospitals should continue to conduct routine risk assessments to determine how well their infection control strategies are working before rushing to adopt a highly touted and possibly costly new protocol, says a member of the Board of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control...
Some healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates have gone down in the past few years, according to the 2011 National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Standardized Infection Ratio Report.
Hospital leadership must ensure that the infection control program had adequate access to the resources needed to support the functions of infection control and prevention. Name these three sources.
On November 6, 2000, the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act was signed into law, and since then, there has been a significant decrease in sharps injuries. However, a coalition called Safe in Common is working hard to reinitiate safety efforts around sharps, believing that the healthcare...
