Active clinical trials for "Cross Infection"

Patients becoming infected during hospitalization occurs frequently and causes harm. It is important for healthcare facilities to take action to prevent these infections and their spread between patients. Despite the presumption of a "sterile" environment, one place where spread of infection is known to happen is in the operating room. This occurs as a result of frequent interaction among healthcare providers, the patient and the environment of the room. Hand washing is an important component of preventing the spread of infections. Scientific evidence has shown that making it easier for people to wash their hands can have two important impacts: (1) reduction of environmental bacterial contamination and (2) reduction in spread of bacterial pathogens. OR PathTrac is new technology that allows tracking of bacterial spread. While data exists about bacterial contamination and transmission in the adult operating room, there is very minimal data about this in the pediatric operating room. Primary aim: To use OR PathTrac to evaluate the effect of a personal hand washing device in reducing operating room exposure to bacterial pathogens in pediatric patients. We hypothesize that this hand washing system will decrease exposure to pathologic bacteria in the pediatric operating room. Secondary aim: To gain knowledge about baseline bacterial contamination and transmission in pediatric operating rooms. We will answer this question by comparing bacterial cultures taken from operating rooms whose personnel are trained to use the hand washing device to operating rooms who are not trained to use the device.

The aim is to deliver an intervention to promote nurse leadership and decision-making in the hospital setting, by providing them with training for maintaining minimum service delivery standards for hospital infection control with respect to COVID-19; but also other infectious disease burden management.

The purpose of the research is to find out the effect of commonly used topical antibiotics on the bacteria that live in the nose, throat and on the skin of older adults. In addition, the investigators want to determine if these topical antibiotics affect how bacteria are spread in Community Living Centers of the VA Maryland Health Care System.

Among critically ill patients requiring mechanical ventilation and catecholamines for shock, nearly 40% to 50% die, and functional recovery is often delayed in survivors. International guidelines include early nutritional support (≤48 h after admission), 20-25 kcal/kg/d at the acute phase, and 1.2-2 g/kg/d protein. These targets are rarely achieved in patients with severe critically illnesses. Recent data challenge the wisdom of providing standard amounts of calories and protein during the acute phase of critical illness. Studies designed to improve enteral nutrition delivery showed no outcome benefits with higher intakes. Instead, adding parenteral nutrition to increase intakes was associated with longer ICU stays and more infectious complications. Studies suggest that higher protein intakes during the acute phase may be associated with greater muscle wasting and ICU-acquired weakness. The optimal calorie and protein supply at the acute phase of severe critical illness remains unknown. NUTRIREA-3 will be the first trial to compare standard calorie and protein feeding complying with guidelines to low-calorie low-protein feeding potentially associated with improved muscle preservation, translating into shorter mechanical ventilation and ICU-stay durations, lower ICU-acquired infection rates, lower mortality, and better long-term clinical outcomes. This multicentre, randomized, controlled, open trial will compare, in patients receiving mechanical ventilation and treated with vasoactive agent for shock two strategies for initiating nutritional support at the acute phase of ICU management (D0-D7): early calorie/protein restriction (6 kcal/kg/d/0.2-0.4 g/kg/d, Low group) or standard calorie/protein targets (25 kcal/kg/d/1.0-1.3 g/kg/d, Standard group). Patients in both groups will receive enteral or parenteral nutrition appropriate for their critical illness. Two alternative primary end-points will be evaluated: all-cause mortality by day 90 and time to discharge alive from the ICU. Second end-points will be calories and proteins delivered, nosocomial infections, gastro-intestinal complications, glucose control, liver dysfunctions, muscle function at the time of readiness for ICU discharge and quality of life at 3 months and 1 year after study inclusion.

Insertion and maintenance of central venous catheter (CVC) lines are common hospital procedures in patients, including those being treated for cancer. CVCs allow clinicians an access point for infusion of fluids, blood sampling, and measurements, decreasing the need for repeated needle sticks to the patient. However, bloodstream infections associated with CVCs (CLABSIs) are a serious complication, leading to significantly longer hospital stays, morbidity, and mortality. Keeping catheter ports disinfected reduces the risk of bloodstream infection; however, consistent and adequate maintenance and disinfection of the line can be difficult. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that passive disinfecting caps can provide a patient safety practice that is easy for clinicians to follow, as well as providing easily auditable compliance, which may lead to lower CLABSI rates. The compliance rate for needleless connector disinfection will be evaluated after implementation of the passive disinfecting cap, and compared to the pre-intervention rate. The CLABSI rates before and after cap implementation will also be compared.

Hospitals are recognised to be a major risk for the spread of infections despite the availability of protective measures. Under normal circumstances, staff may acquire and transmit infections, but the health impact of within hospital infection is greatest in vulnerable patients. For the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, like recent outbreaks such as the SARS and Ebola virus, the risk of within hospital spread of infection presents an additional, significant health risk to healthcare workers. Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) teams within hospitals engage in practices that minimise the number of infections acquired within hospital. This includes surveillance of infection spread, and proactively leading on training to clinical and other hospital teams. There is now good evidence that genome sequencing of epidemic viruses such as that which causes COVID-19, together with standard IPC, more effectively reduces within hospital infection rates and may help identify the routes of transmission, than just existing IPC practice. It is proposed to evaluate the benefit of genome sequencing in this context, and whether rapid (24-48h) turnaround on the data to IPC teams has an impact on that level of benefit. The study team will ask participating NHS hospitals to collect IPC information as per usual practice for a short time to establish data for comparison. Where patients are confirmed to have a COVID-19 infection thought to have been transmitted within hospital, their samples will be sequenced with data fed back to hospital teams during the intervention phase. A final phase without the intervention may take place for additional information on standard IPC practice when the COVID-19 outbreak is at a low level nationwide.

The objective of the study is to determine Bactiguard coated BIP Endotracheal tube´s tolerability, safety and performance and compare it to a standard un-coated Endotracheal tube.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAI) are a significant public health burden. Even with existence of recommendations on technical strategies to prevent these infections, there is a need for strategies to increase staff engagement within the local organizational and cultural context. Positive deviance is one such approach that engages people in improvement efforts. Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges. In the proposed study, the investigators plan to test the effectiveness of using positive deviance based horizontal infection prevention approach to achieve overall reduction of HAIs among hospital inpatients. The investigators hypothesized that a broad and horizontal approach to reduce opportunities for acquisition of nosocomial pathogens using PD will lead to greater reduction of HAI among hospital inpatients compared to standard-of-care infection control approach. The investigators objective was to test the investigators hypothesis and evaluate whether there is greater decline in rate of HAI in the experimental group of wards compared to the control group of wards.

The objective of the study is to evaluate the efficacy of Polymyxin B for treatment Gram negative bacterial infection. The hypothesis of study is Polymyxin B would be the new antibacterial agents for Thai Gram negative infected patients in case of desirable outcomes and minimal side effects.

Severe bacterial infections are associated with mortality of about 30%. Patients with moderate to severe bacterial infections given early and appropriate empirical antibiotic treatment are at a lesser risk for a fatal outcome, with odds ratios ranging from 1.6 to 6.9. However only about 2/3 of patients worldwide are given early and appropriate empirical antibiotic treatment. About 40% of patients treated with antibiotics are given superfluous treatment. TREAT is a computerized decision support system for antibiotic treatment in inpatients with common bacterial infections. TREAT is based on a state of the art stochastic model of the domain (a causal probabilistic network) and uses a cost benefit model for antibiotic treatment, including costs assigned to future resistance. It was tested in a randomized controlled trial in 3 countries and shown to improve the percentage of appropriate empirical antibiotic treatment while at the same time reduce hospital stay and the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. The main limitation of TREAT is inherent in the limited information available within hours of presentation. A second attractive approach to improve antibiotic treatment is to use techniques that do not depend on cultures, and thus shorten the time to identification of the pathogen to a few hours only. The LightCycler® SeptiFast test from Roche performs in vitro nucleic acid amplification test for pathogens causing bloodstream infections. The purpose of the clinical trial is to show that the combined system TREAT/PCR assays will improve the outcome of inpatients with moderate to severe bacterial infections, while at the same time reducing the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, with no or little additional costs. A secondary objective will be to assess the sensitivity and specificity of whole blood PCR, using TREAT as the reference standard.