HCA, the hospital corporation based in Nashville, Tennessee, with 170 hospitals, is taking an aggressive stance on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus with its "ABCs" for MRSA control. The effort is led by HCA's chief medical officer, Jonathan B. Perlin, MD, PhD, MSHA, FACP. The ABCs include: Active surveillance cultures Barrier precautions…

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Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the most common hospital-acquired infection, accounting for 40% of such cases. But most hospitals don't have a consistent strategy for preventing catheter-related UTIs. And most aren't taking basic steps that keep UTIs at bay, a new study finds. Use of urinary catheters is common. One…

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New surveyor guidelines spell out what Medicare expects from hospital infection control programs to help fight current threats like multidrug-resistant organisms, disease outbreaks like flu or SARS, and bioterrorism. The hospital conditions of participation for infection control have not changed. The revised guidelines from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid…

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What should our surgical infection rate be? The conventional way to answer is to benchmark your hospital's rates with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But the new answer is likely to be-zero. It's been thought that a certain number of hospital-acquired infections are to be…

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