New Report Sheds Sobering Light on Hospital Infections

[davkakach]

jdl4ever, this one's for you.   

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2652355

By DAN CHILDS
ABC News Medical Unit

Nov. 14, 2006— A hospital visit may be more dangerous to your health than you realize. Just ask Ingrid Kwiatek, who came home from the hospital with a serious staph infection.

Kwiatek's husband said what started as a routine hospital visit turned into an 110-day nightmare of pain and suffering in three different Pennsylvania hospitals.

"I would never wish this experience on anyone," he said. "Especially distressing was the closed-ranks attitude at all three hospitals in discussing the infection."

Following the incident, Kwiatek's family doctor had this to say: "Hospitals are dirty places."

The High Cost of Infections

A new report released by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council pointed to the high cost of these infections in both dollars and lives.

The report — the first of its kind in the nation — identified the actual number of infections reported by Pennsylvania's 168 hospitals, as well as other related quality-of-care measures, in 2005.

The hospitals studied reported 19,154 cases in which patients contracted hospital-acquired infections. The hospitalizations resulting from these infections amounted to 394,129 hospital days and $3.5 billion in hospital charges.

The average hospital charge for patients with a hospital-acquired infection was $185,260, while the average charge for patients without hospital-acquired infections was $31,389. The average length of stay for patients with hospital-acquired infections was also longer at 20.6 days, compared with 4.5 days, for those who didn't contract hospital infections.

Most telling, though, were the figures on patient deaths. The report said that while 2.3 percent of patients who didn't acquire infections died, the mortality rate for those who did contract infections was 12.9 percent — more than 5½ times as high.

"This report is a first. We are no longer looking at statistics based on estimates or extrapolated data," said Lisa McGiffert, director of Consumers Union's Stop Hospital Infections campaign. "These are real people who suffered from real infections. The personal and financial costs of hospital infections are staggering."

The Pennsylvania study did offer a few solutions. It said that doctors and other hospital workers should wash their hands more regularly, use gloves and properly sterilized equipment, and routinely follow established "best practices." The report also suggested that patients should follow the same guidelines and insist that not only health care providers but visitors wash their hands too.

Shedding Light on Hospital Safety

What adds to the problem, though, according to health officials, is that most states are not required to report infections or provide such information to the public.

"It's time to shine the light on this important and costly issue," said Marc Volavka, executive director of Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. "This will save thousands of Americans from the devastating effects of hospital-acquired infections."

Volavka said the report is a first step toward greater transparency.

"It's time that hospitals, patients and those who pay the bill know how many patients develop hospital-acquired infections, the type of infections they develop and the quality and cost implications," Volavka said. "The more information that becomes available, the better the focus will be on preventing these infections."

"Until now, consumers have been completely in the dark about their hospital's record on infecting patients," said Beth McConnell, director of the Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. "This report sheds light on a very serious problem and will help the public hold hospitals accountable for patient safety."

[cjd]

The above  post is all too true. The worst part of the whole thing is that some of the hospital infections are so resistant that most times very few of the antibiotics will work on them. A larger issue is the countless people that have come into our country illegally and are walking into hospitals suffering from resistant diseases such as TB and highly resistant pneumonia. Many times health care workers are handling people like this for days before any caution is put up and the patient is isolated. The bigest problem is the affirmative action animals that clean equipment and do housekeeping in the hospitals and test labs. House keeping does only cursory cleaning in the rooms when in most cases beds and most surfaces should be wiped down before bring  a new patient into the room. Instruments need to be throughly disinfected and sterilized. Their have been cases where people were given Aids and Hepatitis after receiving colon exams due to dirty equipment. People need to demand accountability from the health care system. Doctors and hospitlas need to realize that its not an assembly line and quality care not quantity care should be the rule.

[jdl4ever]

Nosocomial infections are a big problem precisely because most  patients with serious infections go to hospitals and they are given antiobiotics.  The third world cleaning staff doesn't do a good enough job cleaning a lot of the time and the bacteria stay alive in the hospital wards.  Then they become multi antibiotic resistant due to the dozens of antiobiotics used on patients and some patients get infected with these multi antibiotic resistand bacteria. The worst possible patients usually get the most serious infections and have the highest mortality especially those who are on ventilators (I think half of all pts on prolonged ventilaton get pneumonia).  Those who are bedridden also have a high rate of nosocomial pneumonia so this includes many hospital patients.  Some of the bacteria; mainly psudonomis are persistant and like to infect catheters.  Us doctors due our best to prevent nosocomial infections by washing our hands with disinfectant and wearing gloves and face masks during some procedures.  I personally think it is the immigrant cleaning staff's fault for not doing a better job disinfecting the rooms. 

Many times patients get infections through themselves and families blame it on the hospitals.  For example, when a patient undergoes surgery and the site becomes infected with staph. aureous from the patient's own skin.  This one is partially the hospital's fault since the site should have been disinfected.  Another example is a beddridden patient getting pneumonia due to aspirion of their own saliva (which has dozens strains of bacteria) into their trachea and these baceria then reach the lungs and it turns into pneumonia.  This is called aspiration pneumonia.  Another example is certain types of surgeries (namely on the intestines) where the site will definitely get contaminated with the patient's colonizing bacteria and self infection is expected as a possibility.