title: [The unitilization of laboratory data for infection control].
abstract: Infection control is one of the most important actions for the safety of medical treatment. Many professions need to be involved in infection control practices and the microbiology unit of the clinical laboratory is the first defense against nosocomial infection. There are two roles in infection control; nosocomial infection control in a narrow sense, including occupational infection control, surveillance of hospital-acquired infection, and medical care for infectious diseases. Our infection control team belongs to the clinical laboratory and our infection control practices are based on the accessibility of microbiology data. We established a network for detecting and controlling multidrug-resistant organisms in 2004, when we experienced an outbreak of multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Proactive intervention for bloodstream infections has also been performed in our hospital since 2001. We showed in a recent paper that the prognosis of Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia improved after intervention, which might be due to advances in diagnosis and increased compliance with infection control practices. This article describes how we can utilize laboratory data for an effective infection control strategy.
authors: Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. mnagao@kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp
authors: Miki
authors: M
authors: Nagao
mesh_terms: D003428:Cross Infection / Q000517:prevention & control*; D024881:Drug Resistance, Bacterial; D006801:Humans; D017053:Infection Control / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007755:Laboratories, Hospital; D061214:Patient Safety