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The Hospital Epidemiologist in Long-Term Care: Practical Considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2016

Joseph M. Mylotte
Joseph M. Mylotte*
Affiliation:
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and the Buffalo General Hospital, Buffalo, New York
*
Department of Medicine, Buffalo General Hospital, 100 High St, Buffalo, NY 14203
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Extract

Infection control practices in long-term care facilities have been the subject of an increasing number of reports in the past few years. A recent review by Smith in this series outlined important problems regarding infection surveillance in long-term care facilities including: the lack of standard definitions of infection and the difficulty of applying Centers for Disease Control (CDC) definitions in long-term care facilities: the lack of a consensus on the best approach to infection surveillance in long-term care facilities; the lack of full-time commitment to infection control among long-term care facilities; and the lack of risk stratification of patients. For reasons mentioned previously, the effective solution to these problems will require the input of hospital-based infection control professionals. It would be ideal if, prior to this effort, these professionals could gain some experience regarding the important differences between the long-term care facility and the acute hospital setting.

In this article, the observations of a hospital epidemiologist who has consulted for several years with long-term care facilities will be discussed. Specifically, I will deal with experiences and problems I have dealt with in long-term care facilities that were either new to me or variations of hospital-based experience.

Type
Topics in Long-Term Care
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 12 , Issue 7 , July 1991 , pp. 439 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 1991

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