Bacterial contamination of stethoscopes on the intensive care unit
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We assessed how often bedside stethoscopes in our intensive care unit were cleaned and whether they became colonised with potentially pathogenic bacteria. On two separate days the 12 nurses attending the bedspaces were questioned about frequency of stethoscope cleaning on the unit and the bedside stethoscopes were swabbed before and after cleaning to identify colonising organisms. Twenty-two health care providers entering the unit were asked the same questions and had their personal stethoscopes swabbed. All 32 non-medical staff cleaned their stethoscopes at least every day; however only three out of the 12 medical staff cleaned this often. Out of 24 intensive care unit bedside stethoscopes tested, two diaphragms and five earpieces were colonised with pathogenic bacteria. MRSA cultured from one earpiece persisted after cleaning. Three out of the 22 personal stethoscope diaphragms and five earpieces were colonised with pathogens. After cleaning, two diaphragms and two earpieces were still colonised, demonstrating the importance of regular cleaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it