For many of us we have all had a medical procedure done at least one time in our lives. While researching a hospital or we go to a hospital we trust we always look at several things one of those items we look at is the infection prevention rate of a hospital. This is a number or a percent of patients or anyone involved in the hospital that gets an infection after the procedure is done.
So why I am wanting to write about this subject. Well this week in a North or South Carolina hospital a patient was operated on that had been diagnosed with something similar to Mad Cow Disease. Well after the surgery the medical staff DID NOT SANITIZE THE EQUIPMENT after the patient with Mad Cow Disease was removed from the Operating Room. As a result of this at least 18 MORE patients had a surgery done using contaminated equipment. So imagine how you or someone you loved felt after they had a surgery done and then come to find out you somehow got MAD COW DISEASE.
The following article is from 2012 and its kind of surprising.
Numbers don't lie, but new research by a public health expert at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center finds infection rates following surgery may be higher than the numbers reported by hospitals across the country would indicate.
Approximately 300,000 surgical infections occur annually at hospitals in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Surgical site infections are the second most common health care-associated infection in this country. We know that somewhere between two and five percent of all operations are complicated by infections, and rates are much higher for certain infections. Because reporting varies greatly from hospital to hospital, we wanted to determine the accuracy of the statistics being reported," said Dale Bratzler, D.O., M.P.H., associate dean of the OU College of Public Health.
In two separate studies, he and other researchers utilized Medicare billing data from hospitals and physician offices to follow patients during their surgical admission and after discharge to search for billing codes that suggested the patient may have had a surgical infection. If a bill suggested an infection, the researchers next reviewed medical records to determine if the patients indeed had an infection.
In the most recent of the two studies that did not examine Oklahoma hospitals, they found significantly more infections through this process than had been identified through traditional hospital surveillance – 1.8 to 4.7 times as many infections.
Bratzler said some of the problem stems from the different ways hospitals do surveillance for surgical infections, including post-discharge surveillance. Some hospitals contact patients directly. Others collect information from surgeons after discharge. Some look for hospital readmissions for infections and others look at laboratory or pharmacy data, if available, to identify treatment of infections.
He said it's not uncommon for a patient to have surgery at one hospital, develop an infection after being discharged and then have the infection treated at another health care facility.
"It may be challenging for the first hospital to keep track of an infection that occurred in their patient when they went somewhere else to have the infection treated," Bratzler said." Our research method of using Medicare claims data allowed us to track when a patient has surgery in hospital A, gets an infection and decides to go to facility B to be treated. Without the use of Medicare claims data hospital A may not even know about a patient who developed an infection and went to facility B to be treated."
The study is especially important because starting this month, Medicare now requires hospitals to track and publicly report infection rates for certain surgeries. Without a better way to consistently track infections, Bratzler said those numbers may be substantially underreported.
He added that the findings also point to a way to identify hospitals that may need to be targeted for efforts to lower surgical infection rates.
Further study is planned, but Bratzler said the research clearly demonstrates that their technique, utilizing Medicare claims, identifies more infections than typically reported through standard hospital surveillance methods nationwide.
The research is published in the January 2012 issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
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As sad as this is, it is quite common. Whether it is not sanitizing equipment, or doctors/nurses/staff not washing hands between visiting different patients rooms etc. I have experience with this, as my father contracted MRSA after having a surgery done in a VA hospital...which led to further complications that I won't get into. There was also a stomach virus that was very harsh that was making its way around the hospital, which also could have been prevented using general basic precautions... ie hand washing, wearing gloves, etc. I also know that this impacts nursing homes/adult care facilities as I was employed at one for several years. People do not understand the need for something as simple as hand washing or sanitizing implements. It is all about the rush to get things done. Very sad indeed.
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