Contact precautions in a palliative care unit: a retrospective chart review at a canadian tertiary hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective: To characterize the incidence of contact precautions (CPs) on a palliative care unit (PCU) at a tertiary hospital in Canada. Design: Descriptive retrospective chart review. Setting: Palliative care unit. Participants: Adults admitted to the PCU who were placed on CPs during admission. Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted on all PCU admissions for 25 months from September 24, 2022, to October 29, 2024. Patient orders, clinical notes, medication records, microbiology results, and transport documentation were reviewed. A descriptive and basic comparative statistical analysis was performed. Results: CPs were used in 13 of 549 patient encounters (2.37%), with an incidence of 2.02 per 1,000 PCU patient-days. Indications included known MRSA (5/13), suspected CPO (4/13), new MRSA (3/13), and known vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (1/13). The mean duration of CPs was 15.4 ± 14.1 (range 0.2–47.8) days. Mean hospital and PCU lengths of stay in the CP group were 24.8 ± 14.7 and 14.6 ± 14.8 days, respectively, compared to 23.8 ± 31.3 and 11.7 ± 11.7 days in the non-CP group ( P = .816 for hospital stay; P = .491 for PCU stay). No significant differences were observed between groups in age, sex, or length of stay. Antibiotics were used in 9/13 patients, and 5/13 patients remained on CPs until death on the PCU. Conclusions: This study is the first known retrospective review of CP use in palliative care. Further research is needed to explore its impact on infection outcomes, mortality, and patient-centered measures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".