Editor's Note Researchers at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and Mercy Health Saint Mary’s Hospital, Grand Rapids, Michigan, studied the COVID-19 positivity rate of asymptomatic healthcare workers (HCWs) in a 283-bed teaching hospital, and they to conclude that routine testing of HCWs is unnecessary. To effectively cohort patients,…

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Editor's Note ECRI announced October 21 that its President and CEO, Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, will tell the Food & Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on October 22 that a thorough review of 6 months of completed clinical trial data for COVID-19 vaccines is needed to…

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Editor's Note This study, led by researchers from Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center, Houston, is the first to use hydrogen peroxide vapor (HPV) technology on a large scale to reprocess N95 masks in a healthcare system. The researchers were able to recapture and reprocess 29,706 N95 masks using HPV, with…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on October 21 issued a new Heads-Up Report on challenges that accredited organizations are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Report topics include: Hospital and critical access hospital emergency privileges Ambulatory healthcare competency assessments Behavioral healthcare identification of environmental risks for suicide Laboratory record keeping for…

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Editor's Note To provide flexibility to healthcare workers responding to the COVID-19 crisis, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) waived reporting requirements for healthcare associated infections (HAIs) through June 2020. Using the experience of hospitals in New York City and St Louis, Missouri, the authors provide commentary on…

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Preventing infection transmission has been a chief concern of healthcare leaders and staff striving to protect their patients and themselves from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The virus poses an insidious threat that includes the possibility of bronchoscopy-associated transmission of COVID-19. Long before the pandemic, epidemiologist and researcher Cori…

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Surveys this past year seem to have proliferated, many of them related to the COVID-19 pandemic. What has worked? What hasn’t? What are the next steps? Resuming surgical procedures after the springtime hiatus has helped regain some lost ground. Even as cases of the virus surged in many parts of…

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Editor’s Note: This article from Whitman Partners addresses some ways OR nurse leaders can help their health systems recover from the financial fallout and disruption in normal processes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whitman Partners is a Portland, Oregon-based specialty search firm dedicated to placing directors of surgical services at…

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The COVID-19 pandemic is top of mind for ambulatory surgery center (ASC) leaders, finds the OR Manager 2020 Salary/Career Survey. Most of the 69 ASC leaders who completed the survey responded to an open-ended question about how the pandemic had affected their facility and staff, with the most frequent comments…

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Editor's Note For every two deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the US between March and July, a third person died as a result of the pandemic, finds this study from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Richmond. COVID-19 was cited in 65% of excess deaths (the gap between observed…

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