OSUMC Clinical Epidemiology

Today I spent the day with the infection control team at OSU. The day started fairly early, as we had to review all the culture results for the entire hospital (it's a 1000 bed hospital; fortunately, not everyone gets cultures). These have to be monitored for a few reasons: 1) If anything wildly contagious/dangerous (TB, meningitis, etc) is cultured, the epidemiologists have to begin contract tracing and making sure everyone who has had contact with the sick patient gets proper treatment. 2) Infections, especially hospital-acquired infections, must be reported, according to the Joint Commission (the group that accredits hospitals). 3) Following bacteria and what they are resistant to allows for better antibiotic prescribing practices in the hospital.

After going through the culture results, I went on rounds with the infection control agent of the Ross Heart Hospital (one of the four hospitals that makes up OSUMC). It was rather interesting; many of the things we were looking out for were things I had never considered, such as the exact location of sinks and soap dispensers, making sure all procedure rooms have sterile areas, and checking for dust that housekeeping has missed. By the end of rounds, we had put in two work orders, one for a shelf in a procedure room and one for a sink. We also discussed how infection control personnel can be involved in hospital design, to make sure each room is properly set up for a given purpose.

This particular infection control nurse has been working with the cardiothoracic surgeons on reducing the infections associated with ventricular assist devices (VAD, or for any Grey's Anatomy fans, LVAD). Fortunately, one was being removed and replaced in one of the ORs today, so we went in so she could point out all the infection control changes that have been made, which have resulted in OSU having the lowest infection rates for VADs in the world.

After lunch was the Infection Control Committee meeting, which included reports on the hospital acquired infections and what is being done to reduce those numbers. After that, I went on rounds with the ICU infection control agent. We discussed infection rates and monitoring in the neonatal, medical, and surgical ICUs, and then went on rounds to those areas. All I have to say about that is NICU babies are scary. One pound is pretty small for a human being.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I feel that I learned a lot about epidemiology and how it applies in a hospital setting. It was more of a preventive medicine than occupational medicine day, but that's okay with me.