The National Nurses United (NNU) spoke out against recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention action to finalize infection control guidelines that affect long-term care communities. The NNU says the CDC’s Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) didn’t give people enough time to review a draft of the guidelines.
The draft of the Isolation Precautions Guideline was released to the public on Nov. 2. The CDC accepted feedback on it until the end of the day Monday, which gave the public five days to comment. The rules haven’t been updated in 16 years.
The guidance specifies infection control practices for healthcare facilities in the country. It refers to healthcare workers directly, not employers. The NNU said the guidance “inappropriately” shifted responsibility and risk to individual workers to protect corporate profits.
“The focus of HICPAC’s draft is almost exclusively on personal protective equipment, and it fails to make strong recommendations on other essential measures, such as ventilation and patient screening and isolation,” the NNU stated.
“HICPAC’s draft is permissive and weak and seeks not just to maintain existing practice — which has been shown to be inadequately protective — but even rolls back the use of some important measures, such as airborne infection isolation rooms,” Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, president of the NNU, said in the statement. “This draft guidance will only further degrade the already dangerous working conditions of nurses and other health care workers and further contribute to high rates of moral distress, which will only serve to drive more nurses away from the bedside and further deepen the staffing crisis in health care.”
“HICPAC is missing the perspective of frontline nurses, other health care workers, our unions,” Triunfo-Cortez said.
Triunfo-Cortez said research shows that healthcare workers need multiple measures to deal with viruses. The standards should include ventilation, PPE, screening and isolation, exposure notification, and other measures.
The NNU sent a letter to the CDC in July asking the federal agency to meet and discuss the the concerns about the rules; they also created a petition urging the CDC to recognize aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens to strengthen the agency’s Isolation Precautions guidance. In September, nearly 2,000 experts in public health, infectious disease and industrial hygiene sent a follow-up letter to the CDC director asking for the CDC “to involve key experts and all stakeholders in the development process” and hold public meetings, the organization noted in its statement.
