Health. Care. | An Educational Blog

There are four fundamental aspects of endoscopes that lead to infection: Intricate design, biofilm formation, human error during reprocessing, and failure to dry properly. Much emphasis is being placed on the first: The intricate design of this technology that provides so many reservoirs for bacteria to escape cleaning and be transmitted to a vulnerable host. In today's post, we'll look at how design improvements have led to safer endoscopes, and what we can look forward to in the future of endoscope design.

We hear so often how "we all have a role to play in reducing healthcare associated infections." From washing our hands to advocating for policy changes, it can often feel overwhelming. One way to make our impact more practical is to identify the things that we are uniquely able to do in our current position. In a series of posts starting today, we will explore the actions we can take to reduce infections most effectively based on our professional role in healthcare. We hope these ideas serve as a springboard for your own choices in the future.

Achieving and maintaining sanitized surfaces in hospitals requires an arsenal cleaning and disinfecting products, with quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs or QUATs) being a popular choice. However, as with all cleaners and disinfectants, there are both benefits and risks to their use. In today's post, we'll explore the use of quaternary ammonium compounds and some growing concerns about their impact.

About a quarter of American hospitals are for-profit, that is, they are operated to generate profit for owners and stakeholders. A subsection of those hospitals, about 3%, have been acquired through private equity (PE) buyouts, whereby a PE firm raises funds to purchase a hospital. These PE transactions, also called "takeovers," are characteristically funded through leveraged debt - the firm takes out a loan secured by the purchased entity (the hospital), adding the burden of that debt to the balance sheet (and monthly expenses) of that facility. As a result, hospitals acquired by PE firms face additional pressures; they are operated not only to generate profit but also must repay large amounts of debt, used to fund the acquisition and now added to their balance sheet. A recent study looked into this subsection of hospitals to see how this added financial pressure impacted patient outcomes. The results? Patients are 25% more likely to be harmed by medical care at a private-equity acquired facility.

In our last post, we introduced the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report on patient safety. Today we will focus on how hospital-associated infections are specifically addressed in the report and the report's emphasis on evidence based solutions to address HAIs and other preventable harm to patients. 

This past month, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) submitted a report focused on recommendations around patient safety. In today's post, we'll explore who PCAST is, how they pulled together the report, their main recommendations, and in a future post, we will examine what this could mean for our nation's approach to infection control and prevention. Let's dive in!

Eradicating pathogens from environmental surfaces in hospitals is a daily fight. Keeping bacteria from reproducing on surfaces, finding reservoirs in hard-to-clean areas, and forming biofilms requires daily disinfection, and ideally, some form of continuous mitigation. In today's post, we will look at the threats posed by bacteria that are even more adept at surviving on surfaces: Spore-forming bacteria, and how hospitals are trying to keep these persistent pathogens from threatening their patients.

Almost every country has a government agency responsible for the health and safety of its citizens and its environment. Where those two departments overlap is often where pesticides and germicides are regulated. At this intersection are those chemicals that, if released into the environment, could cause damage, but which, within healthcare facilities, are required in order to kill dangerous pathogens. In today's post, we'll explore two such departments in neighboring nations, the United States and Canada.

In our previous posts about DALYs and QALYs, we have defined the terms and presented how the healthcare field calculates these two measures of disease burden. In today's post, we will narrow our view to just hospital-associated infections and their disease burden. After reading this post, you should have a more detailed picture of the impact HAIs have on American lives.