The Development of a Quality Management Framework for Evaluating Medical Device Reprocessing Practice in Healthcare Facilities.

There is increasing awareness of the importance of medical device reprocessing (MDR) for the provision of safe patient care. Although industry service standards are available to guide MDR practices, there remains a lack of published key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets that are necessary to evaluate MDR quality for feedback and improvement. This article outlines the development of an initial framework that builds on established guidelines and includes service standards, KPIs and targets for evaluating MDR operations. This framework can support healthcare facilities in strengthening existing practices and enables a platform for collaboration towards better MDR performance management.

GET POKED: Comparing an Incentive-Based Flu Campaign with Vaccinate-or-Mask Policies to Boost Influenza Vaccination Rates Among Healthcare Workers.

The median influenza vaccination rate for Toronto acute care facilities in 2013/14 was only 44%, well below the target rate of 90%. While many Toronto hospitals adopted a vaccinate-or-mask policy, Trillium Health Partners (THP) opted to create a multimodal incentives-based flu campaign entitled GET POKED. This campaign, which required significant additional resourcing, only increased our vaccination rate by 10%. While having some modest success, we believe it is unlikely that non-policy based interventions will efficiently and sustainably raise flu vaccine rates. Vaccinate-or-mask policies, while having some inherent challenges, may be worth exploring as part of THP's larger flu-prevention strategy.

Visual processing of the impending collision of a looming object: time to collision revisited.

As an object approaches an observer's eye, the optical variable tau, defined as the inverse relative expansion rate of the object's image on the retina (D. N. Lee, 1976), approximates the time to collision (TTC). Many studies have provided support that human observers use TTC, but evidence for the exclusive use of TTC generated by tau remains inconclusive. In the present study, observers were presented with a visual display of two sequentially approaching objects and asked to compare their TTCs at the moment these objects vanished. Upon dissociating several variables that may have potentially contributed to TTC perception, we found that observers were most sensitive to TTC information when completing the task and less sensitive to non-time variables, such as those that specified distance to collision, speed, and object size. Moreover, when we manipulated presented variables to provide conflicting TTC information, TTC specified by tau was weighted much more than TTC derived from distance and speed. In conclusion, our results suggested that even in the presence of other monocular sources of information, observers still had a greater tendency to specifically use optical tau when making relative TTC judgments.