Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

A very interesting article.

TORONTO (CP) — People who have C. difficile spores in their gastrointestinal tracts but who aren’t sick may be serving as a source of infection for others in hospitals and long-term care facilities battling outbreaks of the difficult-to-contain diarrhea, a new study suggests.

U.S. researchers found these seemingly unaffected patients were nearly as likely as people sick with Clostridium difficile diarrhea to have the bacteria on their skin or on objects in their bedside area.

They even found spores on and around patients who weren’t shedding C. difficile - a discovery that suggests health-care workers were unwittingly spreading bacteria from asymptomatic carriers to non-carriers in the facility.

“It’s kind of been passed down over the years that the patients we should worry the most about are the patients who are having diarrhea,” said senior author Dr. Curtis Donskey, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and director of infection control at the Louis Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

“But there are a lot of patients in hospitals and nursing homes who are carrying the organism. And even though they’re not having diarrhea, they’re often incontinent or very sick and often have kind of reduced standards of hygiene.”

And this:

But Muto thinks the findings point to a more general problem with the way bed-bound hospital patients and nursing home residents are bathed.

Muto’s facility was the first to battle the new epidemic strain of C. difficile. In their efforts, her infection control team has looked into the composition of patient cleansing products sold to hospitals and health-care facilities. They were surprised by what they found.

“It turns out that a lot of the products that are used in health care have no soap in them at all. They just are emollients,” she said.

“Who would ever think you’d have to ask if there was soap in the product if you were looking for something to bathe your patients?”

Donskey agreed more effective bathing approaches should be investigated.

Better check those ingredients of cleaning products like SOAP. Sounds like they may not contain…soap.