Let’s talk about rust, your silent threat to infection control. Rust can wreak havoc on hospital’s moveable medical equipment, surgical instruments and other equipment that is often wiped down with tough healthcare cleaners. The Joint Commission and Center for Medicare and Medicaid services are now on the lookout for rust in your facility, which makes it crucial to prevent and address rust on your medical surfaces.
Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) cost facilities billions of dollars and cause 99,000 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At CME Corp, we consider this trend to be nothing short of tragic, but we do have some answers.
While preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has always been a top priority for healthcare providers, the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a large jump in HAIs by fourth quarter of 2020. While equipment such as ventilators and catheters are top of mind during infection prevention discussions, there are other product solutions that you may not have thought of.
Here are six unique product solutions that will help control environmental risk factors for HAI.
Everyone has heard how dirty our cellphones are, right? They are seven times dirtier than a toilet seat and, on average, a person touches their phone 2,600 times a day. When working in a healthcare setting, this becomes particularly problematic since healthcare workers also touch other small devices such as keyboards, tablets, stethoscopes, and badges all day long.
After the horror of dealing with coronavirus these past few years, hand hygiene has been magnified worldwide. Everyone learned how to wash their hands efficiently and to wash OFTEN.
Along with good hand hygiene, healthcare systems are looking to enhance their infection prevention programs. They realize good hand hygiene is not enough when it comes to airborne transmissible viruses. Healthcare facilities had already begun to add UV-C technology and other innovative ways to augment the fight against Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs), but COVID-19 accelerated these efforts.
Today, 1 out of 25 hospital patients in the U.S. will contract a healthcare-associated infection (HAI). This rate of infection results in an alarming 90,000 deaths annually.
In a peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Infection Control, infection data from 12 months before and after the installation of the VidaShield infection prevention system in the special care unit (SCU) of a hospital in Kentucky was analyzed. Overall infection rates were reduced by 60% and the rates of common healthcare-associated infections like Clostridium difficile, CAUTIs and CLABSIs were reduced by more than 60%, despite no reported changes in the amount/type of cleaning done, the infection control protocol or reporting procedures. (depicted below)1
Combating Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) is a multi-faceted effort that involves almost every aspect in each facility, from staff to equipment and policies and procedures. A CDC study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, regarding HAI found that 25.6 percent of all HAI occurrences were linked to contaminated medical devices.
A retrospective study showed that Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) were the fifth-leading cause of death at U.S. acute care hospitals. With tens of thousands of deaths each year, HAI are no small matter, and while many hospitals are taking steps to prevent these deadly infections, the problem continues and patients remain at risk.
