This week, we're shining a spotlight on our exclusive family of Compliance brand products, all of which were designed to help your facility improve care, save time and reduce costs. We also wanted to tell you about an important product recall and share a recent entry from our blog, Growing Together in Health Care, about the alarming number of residents in long-term care whose noses play host to colonies of MRSA.

Be sure to ask your sales rep for a hot-off-the-presses copy of our Compliance Brand Products brochure! This 20-page catalog showcases products in some of the most popular categories at your facility: diabetic, gloves, incontinence management, enteral pumps, skin care and tapes. When ProMed set out to create the Compliance family of products, we went straight to the experts – our customers. We asked them to examine the best products in the long-term care industry and tell us how we could improve them. We then went to the manufacturers of those products, shared our customers' insights with them and requested that they make their already-great products even better for us. As a result, Compliance isn't your typical "private label." Manufacturers of Compliance products must adhere to the highest standards in the industry. In this way, we ensure that our products are the very best and that no shortcuts are taken. ProMed currently offers close to 100 products under the Compliance brand, and we always welcome your suggestions for new additions! Click here to download the brochure. Covidien is recalling certain lots of its Shiley tracheostomy tubes and custom/specialty tubes among reports of leaks in the tubes' pilot balloons. If there are leaks in the balloons, the cuffs aren't able to hold air, causing ventilation to not work properly and possibly resulting in a decrease in the amount of oxygen in the blood or a sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood, especially if the resident requires assisted mechanical ventilation. The FDA advises that these situations could result in serious injury or even death. If you have purchased tracheostomy products with any of the affected lot numbers from ProMed, please call Janice Moody at our corporate office for assistance with a replacement. Janice can be reached at 800-648-5190, x 7616. To view the lot numbers being recalled, click here. Research at Rhode Island Hospital revealed that one in five long-term care residents have MRSA colonized in their noses. This places those residents at a higher risk of developing an invasive MRSA infection, such as a bloodstream infection, pneumonia or a surgical site infection. The study also found that the quantity of MRSA in individuals' noses varied widely, from three colonies to 15 million colonies. A heavier colonization of MRSA is an independent risk factor for developing a surgical site infection. Approximately 1 percent of the population carries some form of MRSA around in their noses. In addition to long-term care residents, rates also tend to be higher in HIV patients (16 percent), outpatient kidney dialysis patients (15 percent) and inpatient kidney dialysis patients (14 percent). The researchers noted that the presence of MRSA in the nose does not necessarily indicate infection. To view the original blog entry, click here.