The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has recently updated its core infection prevention and control practices for safe healthcare delivery in all settings.

Is your facility fully compliant? What steps must you take to update your practices? This week we discuss the implications of the new guidelines on injection practices and medication safety.

We all know that having comprehensive infection prevention and control practices is a key component of patient safety and high-quality care. We also know that keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of infection prevention is more than a full-time job and often leaves most facilities wondering if they have covered everything. Being compliant requires keeping up with the updated guidelines, changing policies and procedures to match the guidelines and ensuring we provide ongoing staff education to check adherence to the standards.

The new core infection prevention and control practices should be applied in all healthcare settings, including inpatient settings, such as acute and long-term care, as well as, outpatient settings, including clinics, urgent care, ambulatory surgical centers, imaging centers and dialysis centers.

What are the Core Infection Prevention and Control Practice categories?

1. Leadership Support
2. Education and Training of Healthcare Personnel on Infection Prevention
3. Patient, Family and Caregiver Education
4. Performance Monitoring and Feedback
5. Standard Precautions
   1. Hand Hygiene
   2. Environmental Cleaning and Disinfection
   3. Injection and Medication Safety
   4. Risk Assessment with Appropriate Use of Personal Protective Equipment
   5. Minimizing Potential Exposures
   6. Reprocessing of Reusable Medical Equipment
6. Transmission-Based Precautions
7. Temporary invasive Medical Devices for Clinical Management
8. Occupational Health

Injection and Medication Safety updates:

Although there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to safe injection practices and medications safety, infection control is one of most critical components. Below is a list of the newest core practices related to injections and medications.

1. Prepare medications in a designated clean medication preparation area that is separated from potential sources of contamination, including sinks or other water sources.
2. Use aseptic techniques when preparing and administering medications.
3. Disinfect the access diaphragms of medication vials before inserting a device into the vial.
4. Use needles and syringes for one patient only (this includes manufactured prefilled syringes and cartridge devices such as insulin pens).
5. Enter medication containers with a new needle and a new syringe, even when obtaining additional doses for the same patient.
6. Ensure single-dose or single-use vials, ampules, and bags or bottles of parenteral solution are used for one patient only.
7. Use fluid infusion or administration sets (e.g., intravenous tubing) for one patient only.
8. Dedicate multidose vials to a single patient whenever possible. If multidose vials are used for more than one patient, restrict the medication vials to a centralized medication area and do not bring them into the immediate patient treatment area (e.g., operating room, patient room/cubicle).
9. Wear a facemask when placing a catheter or injecting material into the epidural or subdural space (e.g., during myelogram, epidural or spinal anesthesia).

If you are an existing client, the list above should sound familiar. We are continually keeping our clients at the leading edge of the best standards. If you are unfamiliar with any of the topics or want additional details, let us guide you.

Providing ongoing education and assessing staff competency is a requirement of the licensing and accrediting organizations such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC), Quad A, and The Joint Commission (TJC). Working with a specialized pharmacy consultant is an easy way to enhance staff education and assess competency. If you’re not currently working with one, or if your consultant does not provide ongoing updates and assessment tools, reach out to us…we’re always happy to help.

The Consultant Pharmacists at OctariusRx provide guidance on safe medication management, survey readiness and cost savings to ambulatory healthcare facilities/surgery centers, senior care facilities and pharmacies. We also help individual patients optimize their medications to improve their quality of life and save money. Contact us for assistance.