Giuliano Honored for Publication Excellence

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Karen Giuliano, associate professor, has been honored with the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology’s (APIC) 2020 award for publication excellence for her research on the epidemiology of nonventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia in the U.S.

The award recognizes “an author who has published an article in the ‘American Journal of Infection Control’ which was widely read and cited during the previous year,” according to APIC.

Giuliano was lead author of the paper, published while she was an associate professor in the School of Nursing at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. A longtime critical care and medical device innovator, Giuliano joined UMass Amherst in 2019 in a joint position with the College of Nursing and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, where sheheads up a product development and innovation laboratory.

Giuliano and colleagues used the national dataset to quantify the cost, incidence and associated morbidity and mortality of nonventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia, or NVHAP. They concluded that the condition is “an underappreciated and serious patient safety issue, resulting in significant increases in cost, need for continued care after hospital discharge, and mortality.”

In fact, Giuliano points out that the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) point-prevalence survey reported that NVHAP has become the most common cause of hospital-acquired infections.

Giuliano’s findings provide further evidence that preventing NVHAP should be raised to the same level of concern as ventilator-acquired pneumonia prevention.

“Improving our understanding of effective NVHAP prevention strategies is of paramount importance to patient safety,” Giuliano says. “Our program of NVHAP research is now focused on contributing to the emerging body of evidence on the importance of standardized oral care in NVHAP prevention.”