Categories: Antibiotic use, Hand Hygiene, Healthcare-associated infections
April 6th, 2011 8:17 am ET -
Steven M. Gordon, MD, FACP
Guest Author – Steven M. Gordon, MD, FACP
President of SHEA
The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America’s 21st Annual Meeting provided a forum for discussing the latest research, evidence and advances in healthcare epidemiology, with the goal of bringing this knowledge one step closer to bedside implementation and the elimination of healthcare-associated infections. More than 1,600 academicians, researchers, frontline providers, infection preventionists and public health officials attended the four-day event in Dallas.
Two studies that highlight the breadth of the work presented at this year’s meeting are highlighted below. The first, from researchers with the Salt Lake City VA Healthcare System, demonstrates the rising use of broad-spectrum antibiotics over a five-year period. This increased use may be impacting the efficacy of our most powerful antibiotics.
In an era of multi-drug resistant organisms, clinicians are placed in a difficult situation. Because treatment outcomes of many bacterial infections are influenced by the timing of appropriate therapy, the increasing presence of resistant organisms triggers greater use of these powerful antibiotics for proven or suspected infections in hospitalized patients. Studies like this are critical to our understanding of antibiotic resistance.
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Categories: Antibiotic use, BSIs, CLABSI, Healthcare-associated infections, MRSA
March 14th, 2011 1:01 pm ET -
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John A. Jernigan, MD, MS
Author – John Jernigan, M.D.
CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
Today, I am proud to announce that my office is awarding $10 million for new research to five academic medical centers as part of our Prevention Epicenter grant program. This program supports efforts to develop and test innovative approaches to reducing infections in healthcare settings. It is more than research – we are taking novel discoveries and translating them into clinical practice. These efforts save lives.
We founded the Prevention Epicenter program in 1997. CDC staff work closely with academic investigators to discover solutions, and refine them so they can work to prevent infections for all healthcare settings. It has been thrilling over the years to watch the innovations in infection prevention that have come out of this program. Some of our biggest breakthroughs in infection prevention and strategies to save lives have been rooted in research of the Prevention Epicenter program.
Some of the breakthroughs that I have been particularly proud of are:
- using skin antiseptic in routine bathing of patients to prevent HAIs, including the use of chlorhexidine to prevent Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) infections,
- developing cutting edge methods for detecting HAIs such as using computer algorithms to detect bloodstream infections, and
- pioneering a new method for determining the effectiveness of HAI prevention strategies among a large group of hospitals.
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Categories: Antibiotic use, Healthcare-associated infections, Long Term Care (LTC)
December 9th, 2010 3:21 pm ET -
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Nimalie Stone, MD
Author — Nimalie Stone, M.D.
Medical Epidemiologist
CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
As a healthcare professional, I have had the opportunity to work in nursing homes for many years both as a physician, as well as a consultant for infection control programs. When we say “nursing home,” many of us imagine communal living environments where frail elders receive basic support and assistance with activities like bathing, dressing, and preparing meals. However, much of this type of care has shifted to assisted living facilities. At the same time, nursing homes have undergone an extreme make-over; I have witnessed this transformation firsthand. The resident population and the care they receive are rapidly changing. And we must keep up.
Each year, more than 3 million people receive care in nursing homes – a 10% increase over the past 10 years. As this population has grown, we have seen a decline in another area – a 16% drop in the number of nursing home beds. How can more people be receiving care when beds are decreasing?
One explanation is that a growing proportion of people come to nursing homes directly from hospitals not to live, but for temporary care to gain strength and complete therapy before returning back to the community. For this “short-stay” population, nursing homes are not a destination, but a bridge along the journey from the hospital to home.
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Categories: Antibiotic use, Antimicrobial Resistance
November 19th, 2010 12:11 pm ET -
Ramanan Laxminarayan, Ph.D.
Guest author - Ramanan Laxminarayan, Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and an associate research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University.
Through Get Smart, CDC has raised awareness of antibiotic resistance as a serious public health concern that requires action. But where is resistance changing and at what rates? Is any region at particular risk? Are there patterns to its emergence that vary among different combinations of bacteria and antibiotics?
It is with these questions in mind that Extending the Cure has launched ResistanceMap—a new tool for visualizing resistance over time. Our beta version of ResistanceMap takes four common antibiotics (imipenem, methicillin, trimethoprim sulfa, and ciprofloxacin) and charts the resistance of common bacteria (Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli) over the first decade of the 21st century. Each progression shows how resistance has changed from year to year, by U.S. census divisions.
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Categories: Antibiotic use, Antimicrobial Resistance, NHSN
November 17th, 2010 4:39 pm ET -
Elizabeth S. Dodds Ashley, PharmD, MHS, BCPS
Guest author - Elizabeth Dodds Ashley, PharmD, MHS, FCCP, BCPS
Associate Director of Clinical Pharmacy Services and Antimicrobial Stewardship Pharmacist – University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY
Although this question sounds simple on the surface, answering it is one of the biggest challenges to stewardship programs both old and new. Unlike our infection prevention colleagues, antimicrobial stewards lack a uniform tool to measure and report antimicrobial utilization in a consistent way that facilitates benchmarking with similar institutions. Knowing how utilization compares with other centers is an invaluable tool in a field such as antimicrobial stewardship where utilization is driven by trends in resistance and changed by emerging infections making goal utilization an ever moving target.
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