The use of the penicillin antibiotic, piperacillin-tazobactam, was the strongest predictor of the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to the standard treatments for life-threatening blood infections in hospitals, according to a large French...Hospital Medicine
There are some 90,ooo infection related deaths in US hospitals each year. A growing chorus of researchers argue that replacing stainless steel surfaces with copper is the solution.
Keeping patients from getting sick during an inpatient stay has...
September 23rd, 2020The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new recommendations for the prevention and control of Staphylococcus aureus in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patients. The guidelines by researchers at Duke University School...
July 15th, 2020When UK nurses followed modified guidelines that present the same information in a more user-friendly way, nearly two and half times more doses were given without mistakes.
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is changing the way it writes its...
June 17th, 2020Clinicians should be wary of false negative COVID-19 PCR swab tests and rather rely on typical infection symptoms, backed by radiological scans. This warning came from Groote Schuur Hospital’s medical team leader, Professor Graeme Meintjes, whose...
"Pre-habilitation," as it's called, uses the weeks before surgery to encourage patients to move more, eat healthier, cut back on tobacco, breathe deeper, reduce their stress and focus on their goals for after their operation. In 2017, after its...
November 13th, 2019
A study has found that copper hospital beds in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) harboured an average of 95% fewer bacteria than conventional hospital beds, and maintained these low-risk levels throughout patients' stay in hospital....
Too many older adults readmitted to hospitals with same infections they took home. However, a University of Michigan study found that a disproportionately high number of adults return for pre-existing, or linked infections – infections presumably...
October 16th, 2019
Repeated Klebsiella oxytoca contamination on the skin of premature babies in a German hospital's neonatal intensive care unit was eventually traced to the inability of energy-saving washing machines to properly eradicate pathogens.
When...
Operating rooms are a precious resource. They may account for 50% of a US hospital's revenues and cost as much as $80 a minute. A four-year modelling study at the University of Washington improved the accuracy of surgical-case duration estimates...
July 17th, 2019Research has shown how surgical gowns used in hospitals are retaining superbug Clostridium difficile (C difficile), even after being treated with the recommended amount of disinfectant. The research, led by the University of Plymouth, tested...
Indwelling devices like catheters cause roughly 25% of hospital infections, but ongoing efforts to reduce catheter use and misuse haven't succeeded as much as health care workers would like. But most problems with catheter use stem from poor...
July 3rd, 2019More than 50% of bacteria recovered from flying insects in a group of English hospitals were resistant to one or more antibiotics, posing a potential infection risk to patients, according to a study. The Aston University study collected almost...
March 20th, 2019Brown University researchers have developed a new antibacterial coating for intravascular catheters that could help to prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections, the most common type of hospital-acquired infection.
"These kinds of...
March 6th, 2019The spread of antimicrobial resistance in hospitals can be limited by sanitation methods that re-modulate the hospital microbiota, according to a multi-centre trial conducted in Italy. The new sanitation system was associated with a 83% decrease of...
December 12th, 2018Admission to a hospital ward with below average numbers of fully trained (registered) nurses to care for patients is linked to a 3% rise in the risk of death for each day the shortfall persists, suggests UK research. But plugging the gap with...
