Studies Show That Hospitals Can Do More To Avoid Infections
The Washington Post has recently reported on three new studies relating to infections acquired in hospitals. In its article Studies: Hospitals Could Do More to Avoid Infections, the Post states that the studies show new evidence that hospitals could prevent many of the growing number of infections that afflict patients nationwide each year. The studies were published in the American Journal of Medical Quality. Its editor, David B. Nash commented on the findings:
"These three groups independeltly found that despite hospitals'claim that in the sickest patients it's inevitable that someone is going to get a hospital-acquired infection, that's just not the case"
Nash, who is also the Chairman of the Department of Health Policy at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, states:
"[H]ealth professionals should do more to promote hand-washing among medical staff, take greater care in donning gowns ans other infection-preventing clothing during medical procedures, reduce traffic in and out of operating rooms ,isolate patients when necessary and use antibiotics more selectively."
The three studies reported in the American Journal Of Medical Quality were from Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Cardinal Health, Inc, in Massachusetts, and Professor Christopher Hollenbeak, surgical department, Penn State College of Medicine respectively. Dr. Hollenbeak's study examined Pennsylvania's data for more than 180,000 surgical patients and found that hospital practices such as hand-washing, the duration of surgeries and traffic through the operating room played a greater role in hospital based infections. The Allegheny Hospital and Cardinal Health studies respectively demonstrated that there are financial advantages of reducing infections and the severity of the effects of the infection could not be attributed to how sick the patient was at admission.
Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety at the American Hospital Association agreed that more hospital infections are preventable:
"[t]he new wave of research is showing that our previous expectations around what was preventable underestimated what we could actually achieve."