Outside Temperature Impacts MDRO Incidence in Climate-Controlled ICUs
Even in climate-controlled health care units, the outside temperature can influence the indoor temperature, and these changes may impact the incidence of multidrug-resistant organisms, or MRDOs, researchers reported in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. “It remains unclear why seasonality and associations with high temperatures are detected even in hospitals or hospital units with climate control,” Dayanna Conislla Limaylla, MSc, from the post-graduate program in collective health at São Paulo State University, and colleagues wrote. “To fill these gaps in our knowledge, we conducted a prospective ecological study in a teaching hospital in Brazil.”
A 1-2 Punch: How Alarm Surveillance Increases Safety and Reduces Fatigue
An often-cited study at Johns Hopkins Hospital found that there is a daily average of 350 alarms per bed in hospital critical care units. That means that all day (and night) long, critical care nurses are fielding hundreds of audible alarms from infusion pumps, cardiac monitors, ventilators, and other bedside machines. These nearly constant alarms compete for a nurse’s attention and are not prioritized by criticality. Worst of all, the majority of the messages aren’t relevant or actionable. All the noise can lead to deadly consequences should a caregiver become desensitized and assume an alarm is false or misdirected.
