Objective: To investigate the contamination of blood pressure cuffs on medical, surgical, paediatric and intensive care areas in a university teaching hospital. Design: A comprehensive, prospective study quantitatively and qualitatively evaluating the bacterial contamination on blood pressure cuffs of 100 sphygmomanometers in use in ten hospital units from June through to July 2007. Setting: A university teaching hospital with medical, surgical, paediatric and intensive care units. Results: The inner sides of the cuffs were found to harbour more organisms (97%) compared to the outer surface (89%). The inside also had a much higher level of contamination, 29% having >100 colony forming units (cfu) compared to only 8% with >100cfu on the outer surface. On average most cuffs were found to have organisms in the 10—100 cfu range. The most heavily contaminated cuffs (>100cfu) were found on the general intensive care unit. Coagulase negative Staphylococcus was the most commonly isolated organism, found in 67% of samples.
Discitis is a recognized and serious complication of healthcare. We describe the cases of 4 patients, who presented to our unit over a 1 year period. All had exposure to healthcare before the onset of discitis and developed complex infections. There were no additional risk factors for discitis in any of the cases. The risk factors for discitis were peripheral intravenous cannulation in 1 case, intraabdominal surgery in 2 cases and multiple risks including intensive care admission and urethral catheterization in another case. The described cases demonstrate the importance of ascertaining a definitive microbiological diagnosis in healthcare associated discitis and the complex and expensive antibiotic regimens that may be required for the management of such cases. Clinicians should be aware when seeing patients with back pain and recent health care exposure that discitis can be present and complicated and that resistant organisms can be the cause.
Objectives: Timely implementation of influenza infection control and treatment can significantly reduce the impact on Hospital resources and patient management when demand is at peak. Turnaround times of Laboratory based screening tests for the diagnosis of influenza may have an impact on the implementation of infection control measures and treatment. In this study the objectives included determining the correlation between the Abbott ID NOW point-of-care testing (POCT) instrument using the Influenza A&B2 test and the laboratory based GeneXpert Flu+RSV kit. In addition the impact of the POCT instrument on the prescription of antivirals and antibiotics was evaluated by comparing with practice when the instrument was not in place.
Results:The results of the correlation study with a cohort of 54 patients revealed the Abbott ID NOW POCT has 92% sensitivity for the detection of Influenza A, while specificity was 100% for both Influenza A and B. The impact of the POCT instrument on the frequency of prescription of antivirals and amount of antibiotics consumed (33% reduction in antibiotic consumption in a cohort of 65 (2017) and 61 (2018)) was significant. In addition the average patient length of Hospital stay was significantly reduced from 5.26 days to 3.73 days.
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