Exploring Concurrent Approach for Respiratory Epidemiological Surveillance and Symptom Screening (CARES): a new strategy for preventing respiratory infection outbreaks in long-term care facilities.

OBJECTIVE: The Concurrent Approach for Respiratory Epidemiological Surveillance and Symptom Screening (CARES) combines symptom screening to prevent external respiratory infections by managing staff and visitor health and surveillance to monitor the infection rates within the facility and take timely decisions on activity programs based on outbreak prevalence. This study examines the efficacy of the CARES strategy in preventing respiratory infection outbreaks in long-term care facilities. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study utilizing historical controls including an intervention and control group. SETTING: This study was conducted in two long-term care facility wards (total: 110 beds) in Japan. PATIENTS: We enrolled patients aged 1-72 years from the target ward with severe intellectual and physical disabilities from October 1, 2018, to March 31, 2019, and from October 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, for the intervention (n = 104) and control (n = 98) groups, respectively. The study included all admitted patients and excluded those hospitalized or discharged during the study period. INTERVENTION: The total number of days that activity programs, new admissions, and visitations were cancelled in the two groups was compared before and after the introduction of CARES. RESULTS: CARES reduced the duration of new admission cancellations and visitation cancellations by 16 and 23 days, respectively (α = 0.1, P value < 0.001). Additionally, the maximum duration of activity program cancellations was reduced by 2 days. Furthermore, five cases of presenteeism were prevented. CONCLUSIONS: CARES improves patients' quality of life by continuation of activity programs, new patient admission, and ongoing visitations.

The roles of bedside nurses in Japan in antimicrobial stewardship.

BACKGROUND: In the United States and the United Kingdom, the roles of nurses in antimicrobial stewardship (AS) have been described in guidelines. However, in Japan, no previous studies have clarified nurses' recognition of the role of AS. Moreover, how the AS roles were implemented among nurses in Japan has not been fully clarified. The objectives of this study were to determine the perceptions of infection control nurses (ICNs) in Japan regarding the AS role of nurses and the extent of nurses' practice. METHODS: A questionnaire survey of ICNs was conducted. RESULTS: Four hundred responses (response rate, 30.8%) were analyzed. Some of the items that have already gained consensus as the AS role of nurses were not recognized as the AS role of nurses by ICNs or had low implementation rates in Japan. Meanwhile, both recognition and implementation rates were high for the 5 types of care proposed. DISCUSSION: The reason the ICNs agreed that these 5 types of care are AS roles for nurses is that they know that such care can prevent infection and thereby obviate the need for antimicrobial administration. However, whether nurses themselves understand that these are roles for nurses in AS is unclear. To promote AS in Japan, communicating the fact that nurses already contribute to AS, strengthening nurse education, and improving staffing are desirable.

Sharp injuries in Japanese operating theaters of HIV/AIDS referral hospitals 2009-2011.

The aim of this study was to identify how doctors and nurses experienced sharps injuries in operating rooms and the risks for these injuries by analyzing data from 78 Japanese hospitals participating in the nationwide EPINet surveillance system. The years of professional experience of the cases were classified into tertiles separately for doctors and nurses. Suture needles accounted for 54.9% of injuries in doctors and 48.3% of injuries in nurses. Among doctors, injuries occurred most frequently during the use of an item (range: 58.1-64.3%), while among nurses, injuries occurred most frequently (range: 24.7-29.0%) between steps of a multi-step procedure. The frequency of injury by a suture needle held by someone else was 41.1-47.3% (range) among doctors, and 27.0-48.1% (range) among nurses. In conclusion, sharps injuries in the operating room need to address the circumstances of injury and holder of devices based on the specific risk for doctors and nurses to decrease the number of injuries.

Factors associated with surgical site infection in colorectal surgery: the Japan nosocomial infections surveillance.

OBJECTIVE: Surgical site infection (SSI) is one of the most common healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). This study aims to assess factors associated with SSI after colorectal surgery in Japan, using a Japanese national database for HAIs. DESIGN: A retrospective nationwide surveillance-based study. SETTING: Japanese healthcare facilities. METHODS: Data on colon and rectal surgeries performed from 2008 through 2010 were extracted from a national monitoring system for healthcare-associated infections, the Japan Nosocomial Infections Surveillance (JANIS). Factors associated with SSI after colon and rectal surgery were assessed using multivariate logistic regression. RESULTS: The cumulative incidence of SSI for colon and rectal surgery was 15.0% (6,691 of 44,751) and 17.8% (3,230 of 18,187), respectively. Traditional risk factors included in the National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance (NNIS) modified risk index were significant in predicting SSI in the final model for both colon and rectal surgery. Among the additional variables routinely collected in JANIS were factors independently associated with the development of SSI, such as male sex (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.20 [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.14-1.27]), ileostomy or colostomy placement (aOR, 1.13 [95% CI, 1.04-1.21]), emergency operation (aOR, 1.40 [95% CI, 1.29-1.52]), and multiple procedures (aOR, 1.22 [95% CI, 1.13-1.33]) for colon surgery as well as male sex (aOR, 1.43 [95% CI, 1.31-1.55]), ileostomy or colostomy placement (aOR, 1,63 [95% CI, 1.51-1.79]), and emergency operation (aOR, 1.43 [95% CI, 1.20-1.72]) for rectal surgery. CONCLUSIONS: For colorectal operations, inclusion of additional variables routinely collected in JANIS can more accurately predict SSI risk than can the NNIS risk index alone.

Incidence rate of needlestick and sharps injuries in 67 Japanese hospitals: a national surveillance study.

BACKGROUND: Determining incidence rates of needlestick and sharps injuries (NSIs) using data from multiple hospitals may help hospitals to compare their in-house data with national averages and thereby institute relevant measures to minimize NSIs. We aimed to determine the incidence rate of NSIs using the nationwide EPINet surveillance system. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Data were analyzed from 5,463 cases collected between April 2009 and March 2011 from 67 Japanese HIV/AIDS referral hospitals that participated in EPINet-Japan. The NSI incidence rate was calculated as the annual number of cases with NSIs per 100 occupied beds, according to the demographic characteristics of the injured person, place, timing, device, and the patients' infectious status. The NSI incidence rates according to hospital size were analyzed by a non-parametric test of trend. The mean number of cases with NSIs per 100 occupied beds per year was 4.8 (95% confidence interval, 4.1-5.6) for 25 hospitals with 399 or fewer beds, 6.7 (5.9-7.4) for 24 hospitals with 400-799 beds, and 7.6 (6.7-8.5) for 18 hospitals with 800 or more beds (p-trend<0.01). NSIs frequently occurred in health care workers in their 20 s; the NSI incidence rate for this age group was 2.1 (1.6-2.5) for hospitals having 399 or fewer beds, 3.5 (3.0-4.1) for hospitals with 400-799 beds, and 4.5 (3.9-5.0) for hospitals with 800 or more beds (p-trend<0.01). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The incidence rate of NSIs tended to be higher for larger hospitals and in workers aged less than 40 years; injury occurrence was more likely to occur in places such as patient rooms and operating rooms. Application of the NSI incidence rates by hospital size, as a benchmark, could allow individual hospitals to compare their NSI incidence rates with those of other institutions, which could facilitate the development of adequate control strategies.

Heterogeneously vancomycin-intermediate Staphylococcus aureus (hVISA) emerged before the clinical introduction of vancomycin in Japan: a retrospective study.

Vancomycin-intermediate Staphylococcus aureus (VISA) and its precursor, heterogeneous VISA (hVISA), are increasingly the cause of vancomycin treatment failure. Prolonged glycopeptide treatment causes the emergence of these pathogens. However, we recently reported that hVISA can be generated by methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) exposure to imipenem (Katayama et al., Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 53:3190-6). We report here a retrospective prevalence study of VISA and hVISA on 750 MRSA clinical strains isolated from 31 Japanese national university hospitals in 1990, the year before the introduction of injectable vancomycin into clinical use in Japan in 1991. No VISA strain was identified, but population analysis identified 38 hVISA strains (5.1%) from 19 hospitals. We also determined the nucleotide sequences of vraSR, walRK, clpP, and rpoB genes whose mutations are known to be associated with vancomycin resistance. When compared with vancomycin-susceptible MRSA strain N315, six of the 38 hVISA strains possessed nonsynonymous mutations in vraSR, seven in walRK, and two in rpoB genes, Thirteen of 38 (34.2%) hVISA strains possessed at least one of these mutations. Results were consistent with our hypothesis that hVISA was present in Japanese hospitals before the clinical introduction of vancomycin.