Of every 20 people who go into a U.S. hospital, one of them picks up something extra: an infection. It’s a lousy card to draw. Infection stalls recovery, sometimes requiring weeks of intravenous antibiotics or a grueling round of surgeries to remove infected tissue. And for 90,000 Americans a year, the infections are a death sentence.
A growing number of hospitals are working harder to stop infections, but as more bugs become resistant to antibiotics, it’s an uphill struggle. Some 2 million patients get a hospital-acquired infection every year. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 19,000 infection cases occurred in 2005—up from 11,600 in 2004—out of 1.6 million admissions to 168 hospitals, according to a report issued in November by the state’s Health Care Cost Containment Council. Pennsylvania, the first state to provide infection data collected directly from its hospitals, reported that nearly 13 percent of patients who got infections died, compared with slightly more than 2 percent of patients who didn’t have infections.
Nationwide, hospital infections are the eighth-leading cause of death.
There is research showing that there’s an unintuitive causal relationship between physicians and death rates. Fewer doctors leads to decreases in death rates!
More doctors will keep ordering more tests and procedures. Many patients will keep getting opinions until they get one they like better. I know about these infections. Having a draining wound that you have to go to a wound care center and have aspirated every week. Strong antibiotic that leaves you with months of diarrhea and eat up with fungus infections from lack of normal bacteria. Hospital pneumonia takes a lot of people out the back doors.
While it isn’t a silver bullet, any hospital that will not let you tour the pre-op, surgical, and post-op areas you’ll be visiting has something to hide. Period.
Likewise, the unlucky that do get a serious infection are best served by calling a lawyer for their second opinion.
Wow, you’re dense. Clearly an inspection/tour wouldn’t be done in a way to delay surgery, and the environment would be cleaned before surgery… or the people on the tour would be sterilized.
Yes, there’s enough time to do that. Any hospital that says there isn’t is trying to hide things and/or prevent lawsuits.
Of every 20 people who go into a U.S. hospital, one of them picks up something extra: an infection.
Russian roulette, hospital style…
#6, Wow, talk about dense.
A tour won’t tell you anything. Unless you are having elective surgery, it is doubtful you have the chance to even contemplate such a visit. Unless you take along a swab kit and sample all the areas a tour would tell you nothing. Bacteria have this neat little thing about being small. So small in fact that you need a microscope to see them. Because most hospitals have clean areas surrounding surgical rooms, you could casually “tour” them anyway without being sanitized yourself.
Most scheduled surgeries are done in hospitals chosen by the surgeon anyway and / or the insurance company. So unless you can afford to pay full price, then your option is totally useless.
Most of the infections don’t occur in the operating room. Try the recovery and general wards as the most likely to get bugged. Secondly, one thing not mentioned in the report is the number of visitors bringing germs into the hospital and the lowered resistance of most patients that need to be hospitalized.
Because I was getting radiation as well as chemo, my immune system basically didn’t exist. They had me in an isolation room and visitors were few and well cleaned, washed and scrubbed and covered head to toe before entering my room. One day, as I was reading…the door opened and a nice little Hispanic lady wandered in with a mop and bucket and proceeded to empty trash cans and swab my floor….I was stunned…..but not as stunned as the Nurse who walked by and saw it. They got her out of the room(which wasn’t easy, she didn’t speak english and was, after all doing her job) and immediately got another isolation suite ready for me. I got 6 different infections, that took 9 months to clear up. One literally was eating the flesh in my left leg. All because the hospital, in order to save money was hiring non-english reading or speaking housekeeping staff. The women in charge was hiring illegals with fake papers that paid her for the jobs. But, thats another story…..the point is, most of the problems are because of poor hospital hygiene by hospital employees.
The Nurse said the Doctors were the worst, moving on rounds from 1 room to another, carrying the germs with them and their files. Next were Interns, the interns were very zealous about scrubbing up between patients, but then would whip out some item from their pockets and look into a patients ears or eyes……or use the stethoscope they had around their neck or tucked into their pocket….which they used on all their patients.
My Doctor told me that what makes it worse in todays hospitals is the fact that Doctors have prescribed antibiotics for just about everything for 60 years now, plus they are in our meat and milk supply, and the bugs are no longer affected by them.
#8 – Will you ever get smarter? I dobut it.
Asking to take a tour or an inspection is the only way someone has to know what’s going on behind the curtain. Are rooms clean when you pass them, or are they sitting there “used”?
While this is only plausible for elective surgery (the fact you called that out is pathetic), you do… in the end… have a choice about which doctor you go to and which hospital you go to. The idea that you don’t is just an excuse by lazy people who don’t want to understand the system.
I have diagnosed James Hill with optal-rectalitis. He has his head so far up his ass he can’t see for shit.
#14: Like this?
#14 & 15,
Isn’t there a law about making someone laugh so hard they spray morning coffee all over the keyboard, monitor, wall, and wife?
#13 – As usual, you hit the nail on the head. As for James Hill’s net worth, I have no idea, but a wealthy, entitled attitude would account for his transparent arrogance and his apparent blindness to how most peoplehave to live.
Choice in doctors – yeah, right. I had surgery in the VA hospital a couple years ago, nonelective and serious, and then spent six weeks there with a catheter running from my arm to just above my heart, dripping a strong antibiotic cocktail 24/7 until a general staph infection finally cleared up. I’ll be forever grateful to the VA doctors and nurses for saving my life and for treating me with decency and even dignity, to the extent that’s even possible in a hospital. I can’t say with certainty that I had no generalized staph infection when I arrived, but even if I could, the thought of making my next consultation a lawyer just gives me the willies.
For anyone who thinks there is too much government in your life, this is an area that should give you that Meriwether Lewis crossing the Rockies for the first time wide open spaces feeling. Six states track and publish hospital infection rates. Other states track the information, but keep it on double secret probation. Wonder who benefits from that practice? McDonald’s tracks pickles slices better than we track hospital infection rates. And what would the cost to do this be? Probably a tenth of malpractice insurance cost now. Plus, there’s the added benefit of being able to use the slogan “we killed fewer folks last year than our competitor” Once beyond the initial loss of revenue from patients seeing your numbers and opting to lease a Gulfstream and fly to Baghdad to use a faith healer, because it would be safer and cheaper, hospitals that fixed the problem might actually improve their bottom lines.
Isnt a 5% rate of infection at a hospital better than the 50%+ it was a century ago?
jebus people – its a hospital, theres sick people there, its not a cleanroom where silicon chips are manufacturered, infection is GOING TO HAPPEN.
I’m not a doctor but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. The majority of problems in the hospital occur when nurses don’t wash their hands after going doody. In extreme cases where one ass cheek looks like a dirty refrigerator door, they are so obese that they must drag there ass on the carpet “to freshen up.” Now this pisses off the orderlys and they try to clean it up the best they can but they swing the mops so hard it splashes into the doctors coffee cups. Some of these mops are squeezed deliberately into hospital admistration and other douchebags. I tremendous amount of nose picking happens right before they slide a rectal thermometer into you mouth as well. The hospital food comes from local homeless shelters that wouldn’t accept the food. We hope James Hill comes here for the sex change operation.
hmmm, TASTY