Jewish Hospital-Mercy Health can be held up as a shining example of what can be done to curb the rate of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), according to an article on the CleanLink website.

The Cincinnati healthcare provider had a C. diff incident rate of 25.27 per 10,000 patients in 2009. It cut the infection rate by 50 percent in under a year by standardizing care, adopting stricter antibiotic controls and incorporating new room cleaning protocols. 

“In all honesty, altering our environmental cleaning practices had the most significant impact out of all the changes we made,” according to Jenny Martin, manager of quality administration.

“The science is now compelling and clear that environmental hygiene is an important component of infection control,” said Mark Heller, owner of Mark Heller Consulting Inc., an Alberta, Canada-based firm specializing in helping the Canadian healthcare system improve its operations.

Read the article.