Kevin Sack’s recent New York Times article covers a joint effort to publish infection control guidelines. While primarily hospital-centric, long-term care facilities are more than aware of the struggles around controlling infections and encouraging best practices.

From the article on infection control:

Hoping to improve infection control in hospitals, the nation’s top epidemiological societies joined Wednesday with the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, to issue a compendium of guidelines for preventing six lethal conditions.

The unified backing of the hospital association and the accrediting agency should give the recommendations some teeth. The Joint Commission’s vice president, Dr. Robert A. Wise, said his agency would spend the next year studying which guidelines it would add to its accrediting standards in 2010.

The recommended practices, like vigorous hand-washing before the insertion of catheters and warnings against using razors to remove hair before surgery, do not vary in significant ways from the encyclopedic guidelines issued and revised over the last two decades by a government advisory panel.

Click here to read the entire article.