|
McCaughey spells out three steps. First: screening. She says hospitals should test incoming patients for drug-resistant infections harmless on our skin, deadly inside our bodies. She says if hospitals separate those who test positive from those who don't, infection rates drop. “It’s a simple skin swab or nasal swab. It’s a non-invasive test," she says. Isolation simply means keeping patients in separate rooms and cleaning thoroughly between.
Right now Tri-state hospitals do not test patients. Dr. Blatt says he's not sure that works. "If we really find that universal screening is effective, I think we would adopt that, but so far the studies are about 50/50 as to whether it is effective or not," he says.
McCaughey disputes that but offers a second step to reduce infections. She says hospitals must clean all surfaces in every room before a patient enters. "Cleaning means removing bacteria from the blood pressure cuffs, the bed rails, the stethoscopes, the EKG wires, the privacy curtains,” she says. “Virtually every surface in a hospital is heavily contaminated with an alphabet of bacteria. MRSA, VRE, C-Diff and many others. Stand in any emergency room and watch even the most well-intentioned doctors and nurses clean their hands, glove, and then reach up and rip open the privacy curtain to see the next patient. The curtain is seldom cleaned and so the caregivers' hands are already contaminated before they reach the patient."
McCaughey offers a third step, which is the most controversial in medical circles: creating a public hospital report card that would allow people to see how hospitals compare on controlling infections.
Nancy Oliver is a consumer advocate pushing for this option. She says, "We as healthcare consumers should expect greater transparency and accountability by our hospitals. If you or I would like to buy a car or a major appliance we could find a bunch of information pretty readily about that kind of purchase."
But not for hospitals, Oliver says. She’s working to change that through a committee working with the Ohio Department of Health to develop a website so people can look up hospitals and their rates of infection.
Oliver became an advocate after her own family tragedy. Her father got an infection during or right after triple bypass surgery. She says the surgeon gave her family a 98% chance he'd sail through. "We thought he’d be home in about a week and instead at the end of that week he was in the intensive care unit fighting for his life."
Oliver’s father contracted an infection “in his surgical site in his chest and it spread to the chest cavity and eventually his bloodstream." The culprit was MRSA, a drug-resistant organism whose rates have increased dramatically in the United States in the past decade.
|
