I’ve been asked by the Editor of the Journal of Hospital Infection to begin writing a monthly column providing an overview of key updates in the infection prevention and control literature. I’m pleased to say that the first edition (June 2014) is now available on the Journal of Hospital Infection website, and I’m delighted that the Journal Roundup is open access.

I thought it would be useful to outline how I produced this roundup. I began by scanning the tables of contents of the following journals, pulling out articles of interest: AJIC, Ann Intern Med, BMJ, CID, ICHE, JAMA, JAMA Intern Med, JHI, JID, JIP, Lancet, Lancet ID, NEJM. This was easy for the “big five” (Lancet, BMJ, AIM, JAMA and NEJM) because only a handful of articles are directly relevant. It was more tricky for the specialist journals, since all articles are likely to be of interest. I’ve tried to avoid focusing solely on my own research interests, but these doubtless come through. One way to mitigate this in future is for others to provide a Journal Roundup now and then – or at least make some contribution. If you’re interested in this, please do let me know.

Highlights of this inaugural issue include a spike in MERS-CoV cases, coverage of the WHO report on antimicrobial resistance, more evidence that faecal microbiota transplantation works for curing recurrent CDI, the impact of nursing education on patient mortality, individualized antibiotic dosing, CA-MRSA in US Fire Stations, a successful community-based hand hygiene intervention, an outbreak of CRE in Ireland, updated SHEA guidelines for SSI and CDI, the identification of ‘optimum outlier’ (aka ‘positive deviant’) cleaners, a disturbing patient story, an update on the move towards ‘bare below the elbow’ in the US, an overview of the regulatory environment for healthcare apps, conference abstracts from APIC and ECCMID, and the use of Yelp (a customer review website) to identify cases that would otherwise have gone unreported during a foodborne outbreak.

Please feel free to share this with your colleagues, and let me know if you have any thoughts or comments.