HCW TB survey

Members of an Occupational Health list were asked the following questions on TB testing;

1. Is everyone requiring two-step testing on hire?
2. Is anyone using Quantiferon testing?
3. Do you test all employees on an ongoing schedule or only post exposure?
4. How big is your organization and what is your TB risk (how many TB patients are seen in your facility per year)?
   

There were 16 responses of which 4 stated that they had switched over to QFT and a further 4 said that they used QFT to confirm TST+ or TST indeterminates.

Presently 50% are using QFT (either wholly or in part) with 50% using TST only. One responder noted that distance was a decision factor, perhaps they are not yet using QFT-GIT.

Facility size ranged from 350 to 7,500 HCWs and 25 to 704 beds.

The facility with 7,500 HCWs made the following observations;

"We do Quantiferon Gold on all new hires...We do annual testing on staff and providers that work at other Hospitals in order for our staff to get privileges. We have been working to get these facilities to also follow CDC. We know from other hospitals in our State that have stopped doing annual testing that if CDC evaluations are done, most, if not all, would be very low risk."

"We follow CDC TB guidelines and are a low risk system, so we have eliminated annual TB testing. 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."