Infection Control Today, March 2021 (Vol. 25 No. 2)

Infection preventionists can coordinate with physicians and other subject matter experts on common areas of vaccine hesitancy among staff, and work with key stakeholders to address them.

Hand hygiene is always important, but during this pandemic it’s crucial to preventing transmission. Now technology is making it possible for hospitals not only to monitor compliance, but also potential viral exposure.

Infection preventionists have the skill set to provide guidance beyond the health care setting. We know how to select PPE and how to use it. Cleaning and disinfection are like breathing to us.

It’s possible that infection preventionists and other health care workers who caught COVID-19 in the first wave can be reinfected.

Many members of environmental service teams feel underappreciated and these health care professionals are not trained in any systematic and continuous way, a study states.

Assume that everybody in a hospital setting is an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19, two recent studies suggest.

Kevin Kavanagh, MD: “One of the things that’s really frustrated me with this epidemic and pandemic is that people are totally focused on dying…. But in actuality, the disabilities are much, much more concerning because that is even affecting the young people.”

Officials at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have the ability to convert several floors into airborne infection isolation rooms (AII), or more commonly termed negative pressure rooms, with the flip of a switch.