Category Archives: Blog
What to Expect in Healthcare in 2023
Challenges are ahead for hospitals and healthcare systems in 2023. That’s always been true, of course, as each year holds a mix of opportunity and challenge. However, 2023 will be a year in which healthcare leaders can no longer ignore long-standin...
Hand Hygiene Compliance Rates Aren’t as Important as You Think
Want to decrease HAIs in your hospital or healthcare facility? Stop focusing on hand hygiene compliance rates. Yes, poor hand hygiene is strongly associated with healthcare-associated infections. That much has been known since the mid-1800s when Dr. ...
Addressing Inequities in Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs)
Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous people experience higher rates of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) than white people in the United States. A 2016 review of more than 79,000 adults hospitalized with acute cardiovascular disease, pneumonia,...
6 Strategies to Boost Nurse Retention
Nurse retention is key to meeting clinical demand in an era of pervasive workforce shortages. Nursing schools are not producing enough new nurses to replace the tens of thousands of nurses leaving the practice – and it will be years before schools ...
The True Cost of HAIs is Higher Than You Think
When adjusted for inflation, healthcare-associated infection (HAIs) in U.S. acute care hospitals cost $122 – $147 billion annually in direct and indirect costs. Such staggeringly large numbers can be difficult to comprehend, but in an era of ti...
Planned Closure of Atlanta Medical Center Will Impact Community Health
“Access to appropriate healthcare” is listed as the number one community health priority in the 2022 Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center Community Health Needs Assessment adopted by the Wellstar Board of Trustees on June 2, 2022. On August 31, 2022, ...
What Gen Z & Millennial Nurses Need
The future of healthcare is in the hands of Millennials and Gen Z. In 2020, the median age of Registered Nurses was 52 years, according to the American Nurses Association. At that time, more than 1/5 of nurses said they planned to retire within the n...
Monitoring the 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene May Not Be Necessary
The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the “5 moments of hand hygiene” in 2009 to highlight the importance of hand hygiene in preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). WHO recommends that healthcare workers clean their hands at ...
Glove Use Requires Extra Attention to Hand Hygiene
Wearing gloves – an intervention designed to protect patients and providers from pathogen exposure – is counter-intuitively associated with poor hand hygiene. Hand hygiene rates are almost universally lower when healthcare providers use glo...
Closing the Gap Between Hand Hygiene Perception & Reality
Healthcare workers commonly estimate their hand hygiene compliance before touching a patient to be nearly 80%. In actuality, compliance is often as low as 12%, according to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Infection Prevention. Providers simp...