Shannon Barnet, Becker’s Infection Control & Clinical Quality
Try as hospitals might, there are several barriers that make achieving optimal disinfection of patient rooms, operating rooms, and shared patient care equipment challenging.

GOJO Industries, Inc. via Infection Control Today
United in Safety was the theme of Patient Safety Awareness Week, led by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) and held March 8–14, 2015. GOJO Industries, a leader in hand hygiene and skin health and inventors of PURELL® Hand Sanitizer, joined the NPSF and hospitals across the United States to educate and gain awareness for the critical importance of patient safety.

Amy Eagle, H&HN
When catastrophe strikes, one service a community can’t lose is the hospital. Health care organizations must continue to operate in a crisis. It’s a matter of patient safety, business continuity, and public service, says Doug Erickson, chair of the Health Guidelines Revision Committee, which oversees the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities.

Ron Harrison, PhD, McKnight’s Long Term Care News
How many pests are acceptable in your health care facility? That's a loaded question. And the answer isn't as simple as it seems.

Patrick Springer, Inforum.com
Some steps along the path to healing begin on the drawing board. Poor hospital design can make it easier for infections to spread, generate or amplify noise that irritates patients and staff, or confront patients and visitors with a confusing layout that drains time from staff barraged by distracting requests for directions.

Nancy Jenkins, American Laundry News
The benefits of reusable surgical gowns and textiles over disposable single-use items are proven: They offer enhanced comfort, cost, performance, and are environmentally preferred. In addition, according to Standard Textile, when hospitals convert their operating rooms (ORs) to a reusable program, they can reduce waste by 90 percent, since OR waste is primarily infectious (red-bag) waste and costs as much as 30 cents a pound to landfill.

iHealthBeat
The study aimed to assess how hospitals' 30-day readmission rates related to their Facebook star ratings. Since late 2013, Facebook has given organizations the option of allowing users to rate them using a five-star system.

Lee Ann Jarousse, H&HN
Hospital sustainability programs reduce costs and enhance the quality of patient care. However, given the long list of priorities that hospitals must tackle, sustainability too often falls by the wayside. Today, the benefits of sustainability are too important to ignore.

Brian Currie, MD, MPH, Infectious Disease Special Edition
The past 20 years have seen a dramatic change in the epidemiology of Clostridium difficile infections (CDI) in the United States and on a global basis. The frequency of infections has dramatically increased—from 2000 to 2009 the number of U.S. hospitalized patients with any CDI discharge diagnosis more than doubled, from approximately 139,000 to 336,600 and the number with a primary CDI diagnosis more than tripled, from 33,000 to 111,000.

Maggie Fox, NBC News
At least 15 Americans were exposed to Ebola from a single, infected U.S. health care worker and have been brought back to the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Rosie D. Lyles, MD, McKnight’s Long Term Care News
In recent years the growing threat of multi-drug resistant organisms has put pressure on long-term care facilities to focus on infection control and improve antibiotic stewardship efforts. While most long-term care providers are familiar with pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff), many are not aware of Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, a lesser known but dangerous type of bacteria that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dubbed "nightmare bacteria" and classified as an immediate public health threat. In the U.S., the most common type of this bacteria is Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC)-producing Enterobacteriaceae.

California Healthline
California hospitals continue to show overall low rates of health care-associated infections, but cases of Clostridium difficile and some surgical infections are still on the rise, according to a report released Friday by the California Department of Public Health, the Los Angeles Daily News reports.

Jeff Boss, Forbes
There’s a leadership gap that exists in industry today. In government, education, business, and non-profit sectors, leadership have become an exception rather than the rule due mainly to the "me" centric approach that governs self-interest. If leadership is about authentic self-expression that inspires others to act or think in a certain way, then when was the last time you were led by someone?

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, Harvard Business Review
At Deloitte we’re redesigning our performance management system. This may not surprise you. Like many other companies, we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people—and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly—is increasingly out of step with our objectives.

Darleen DeRosa, Business 2 Communit
Most companies understand the benefits of leadership training and development programs. In fact, in a recent survey of more than 500 executives, 27 percent of those who said their company was "currently winning in the market" attributed that success to great leadership, while another 25 percent credited powerful and distinct capabilities.

Thursday, March 19
Effectively managing change involves evaluating, planning and implementing processes, tactics, and strategies.

Wednesday, April 15
This webinar walks environmental services leaders through the maze of identifying, selecting and applying effective staffing standards for your facility.

MyAHE is the area for you to collaborate and interact with your peers to discuss and compare solutions to common issues. We welcome you to provide feedback, network, and share your knowledge with others. MyAHE allows you to network in real-time with peers and experts around the country. We want to make sure you are making the most of this robust members-only benefit since research has shown that networking is a top rated benefit of AHE members.

Environmental Services Technician Certification will not only signify technical accomplishment, but also commitment to performance excellence. Begin differentiating your team of environmental services technicians... and start making significant contributions to the patient experience of care, the facility, the profession, and the community!

The AHE Innovation Award presents a tremendous opportunity for companies and organizations to be recognized for innovative and improved products, processes, and technology advancements. AHE’s goal with the Innovation Award is to increase awareness of innovations that empower individuals and organizations to improve measured outcomes in the health care environment. The award is open to AHE members and non-members and requires a nominal application fee of $300 at the time of application. Apply now!

Dan Verel, MedCity News
While the politics of Obamacare remain as a divisive as ever, the Affordable Care Act has helped usher an entire new health economy that has led to the creation of at least 90 new companies since 2010, centered primarily around consumer-driven innovations, according to a new report.

John Geyman, Huffington Post Politics
Having looked in the last two posts at access and affordable costs of care five years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), we now examine its impact on quality of care, the third leg of the stool that defines the structure and performance of a health care system.