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Doctors’ Garments And Bacterial Contamination

This colorized 2005 scanning electron micrograph depicts numerous clumps of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, magnified 2,390 times. Content provided by CDC/Jeff Hageman, MHS, via the CDC's Public Health Image Library (PHIL)Bacterial contamination of physicians’ newly laundered uniforms occurs within three hours of putting them on, making them no more or less dirty than the traditional white coats, researchers reported.

Researchers sought to compare bacterial and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus contamination of physicians’ white coats to freshly laundered short-sleeved uniforms, and to determine the rate at which bacterial contamination happens. They reported results in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

ACP Internist‘s blog recently took up the debate as well. The issue has cropped up over the years, assessing not only the cleanliness but the professionalism inherent in the white lab coat.

Researchers conducted a prospective, randomized, controlled trial among 100 residents and hospitalists on an internal medicine service at Denver Health, a university-affiliated public safety-net hospital. Subjects wore a white coat or a laundered, short-sleeved uniform.

At the end of an eight-hour workday, no significant differences were found between the extent of bacterial or MRSA contamination of infrequently-washed white coats compared to the laundered uniforms. Sleeve cuffs of white coats were slightly but significantly more contaminated than the pockets or the midsleeves, “but interestingly, we found no difference in colony count from cultures taken from the skin at the wrists of the subjects wearing either garment,” researchers wrote.

And, there was no association found between the extent of bacterial or MRSA contamination and the frequency with which white coats were washed or changed. Colony counts of newly laundered uniforms were essentially zero, but after three hours they were nearly 50 percent of those counted at eight hours.

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

A Report From The BlackBerry Clinical Collaboration Summit

Last week, Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry smartphones, held a clinical collaboration summit in Boston to discuss their vision of the future of mobile device integration into healthcare IT. Several vendors and app makers attended and shared how they are implementing mobile devices into workflows with RIM claiming their superiority in security and data protection through data wiping, access control, and audit trail.

One claim that several speakers made was that hours per week could be saved by making clinical and logistical data available on smartphones and that studies have shown clinical information presented on a small screen can be used for mobile situation diagnostic ability, notably for ECG and OB data through companies like AirStrip. A few studies have backed parts of this claim, [including] a recent paper in the Journal of Hospital Medicine by Wu. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

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