To evaluate the impact of a vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) screening policy change on the incidence of healthcare-associated (HA)-VRE bacteremia in an endemic hospital setting.

A quasi-experimental before-and-after study.

A 1,989-bed tertiary-care referral center in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Since May 2010, our hospital has diminished VRE screening for admitted patients transferred from other healthcare facilities. We assessed the impact of this policy change on the incidence of HA-VRE bacteremia using segmented autoregression analysis of interrupted time series from January 2006 to December 2014 at the hospital and unit levels. In addition, we compared the molecular characteristics of VRE blood isolates collected before and after the screening policy change using multilocus sequence typing and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis.

After the VRE screening policy change, the incidence of hospital-wide HA-VRE bacteremia increased, although no significant changes of level or slope were observed. In addition, a significant slope change in the incidence of HA-VRE bacteremia (change in slope, 0.007; 95% CI, 0.001–0.013; P = .02) was observed in the hemato-oncology department. Molecular analysis revealed that various VRE sequence types appeared after the policy change and that clonally related strains became more predominant (increasing from 26.1% to 59.3%).

The incidence of HA-VRE bacteremia increased significantly after VRE screening policy change, and this increase was mainly driven by high-risk patient populations. When planning VRE control programs in hospitals, different approaches that consider risk for severe VRE infection in patients may be required.

To investigate the annual rate of tuberculosis (TB) infection among newly employed nurses using both tuberculin skin test (TST) and QuantiFERON-TB Gold (QFT-G; Cellestis Limited) assay.

A prospective cohort study involving newly employed nurses.

A tertiary care university hospital in South Korea.

All participants (n = 196) were tested with the TST and QFT-G assay at baseline. After 1 year, the TST and QFT-G assay were reperformed for subjects who had negative TST results at baseline and for all subjects, respectively.

The baseline TST and QFT-G assays were positive for 101 subjects (51.5%) and 28 subjects (14.3%), respectively; 22 subjects (11.2%) had positive results of both tests. Although the overall between-test agreement was 54.9% (κ = 0.151 [95% confidence interval, 0.047–0.245]), agreement improved to 78.5% (κ = 0.462 [95% confidence interval, 0.007–0.917]) for subjects who had not received bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination. After 1 year, the TST yielded positive results for 16 (21.3%) of 75 nurses with negative baseline results, and the QFT-G assay yielded positive results for 21 (14.4%) of 146 subjects with negative baseline Results. Collectively, 5 subjects (3.0%) experienced conversion to positive results with both tests, and 32 subjects (18.9%) experienced conversion to positive results with one of the tests. Neither the employing hospital department nor exposure to patients with TB affected test conversion status.

The poor overall agreement between TST and QFT-G results may have been caused by the confounding effect of bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination. The annual risk of TB infection among newly employed nurses was at least 3% on the basis of results of both the TST and QFT-G test. Stricter preventive strategies against TB spread should be implemented in our hospital.