Our policy is that we follow CDC guidelines. CDC says fairly clearly that all persons working in a health care facility should be immune to certain diseases. Our opinion is that we are protecting our patients by following CDC guidelines. Given we are talking about our patients not being exposed to diseases at our facility; We feel it would be unusual to have a court not agree that (in the words of a certain star trek character) "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one"
From previous discussions it appears that it has taken them about a year to validate the test, in October 2007 the manager of Marshfield Clinic notified others that they had just received news of the QFT-GIT FDA approval saying;
We will be working on testing it and implementation. Has anyone replaced their annual TB skin test totally with QFG? Looks like CDC is recommending using the QFT in place of the skin test for annual testing.In June 2008 Marshfield Clinic announced the availability of QuantiFERON-TB Gold In-Tube saying
QfG IT is currently available only at Marshfield Center and Saint Joseph’s Hospital..Marshfield Clinic has over 40 locations throughout Wisconsin and are also in the process of substituting the TB skin test with QFT;
...Work is ongoing to make QfG IT available at other locations later this year
We also switched to Quantiferon Gold Blood Testing for TB. This has made it a lot easier to get new hires done and also some of our providers that still need annual testing for privileges at other facilities.
