Rising hospital infection risk

If the thought of a hospital stay terrifies you, you're not alone. You're not irrational, either--because hospital patients die every day for no good reason.

Or, as the Washington Post put it in a recent headline, "Hospital infection deaths caused by ignorance and neglect, survey finds."

That survey of nurses, conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, found that common deadly hospital infections could be prevented with just a little more attention and a little more money for training. In this case, they're referring to catheter- related bloodstream infections, or CRBSIs... but they could just as easily be referring to any of the other completely preventable infections running rampant in our hospitals.

CRBSIs strike when hospital staff inserts or removes a catheter without washing up first, without disinfecting the catheter site, or when the catheters are left in too long.

If you've spent any time in a hospital, you know how easily that can happen. That's why at least 80,000 patients suffer these infections every year--and 30,000 of them die, accounting for nearly a third of the estimated 100,000 annual deaths due to hospital-acquired infections.

There's no excuse for it... but 70 percent of the 2,075 survey respondents--mostly infection control nurses--said they simply don't have enough time to train other hospital workers on the procedures that could prevent infections.

Is that scary or what?

In addition, a third of the respondents said they have a hard time enforcing the simple best-practice guidelines-- such as proper hand-washing--that would cut back on these infections. And 20 percent said hospital bureaucrats won't spend the money needed to prevent these infections-- despite the fact that preventing them now would be much cheaper than treating them later.

Meanwhile, half the nurses said they're still in the bureaucratic stone age--using paper records to track infections instead of the computerized systems that can quickly spot the warning signs and identify infection clusters.

And another new survey conducted by the association found that only a third of California hospitals have these computerized systems in place.

It's stunning and downright inexcusable when you think of how many people--even kids--carry computers in their pockets these days.

Meanwhile, a new study finds that simple screenings could prevent many of the 750,000 annual cases of blood infection that strike after surgical procedures.

Researchers looked at the data on 363,897 patients who underwent surgery between 2005 and 2007, and found that 2.3 percent of them experienced those blood infections, called sepsis, while 1.6 percent suffered dangerous dips in blood pressure caused by those infections--a condition known as septic shock.

Meanwhile, just 0.2 percent of the patients suffered a heart attack. That makes sepsis more than 10 times more common than that better-known surgical risk. And since the two conditions are equally deadly, that means sepsis kills 10 times as many patients. Sepsis can also lead to coma, long hospitalizations and amputations.

The researchers wrote in the Archives of Surgery that sepsis screening should be mandatory for patients over 60 who need emergency surgery and suffer from at least one other disease or condition.

But at this point, it's safe to say that anyone who spends time in a hospital should be screened for infection.

Even the visitors.

On a mission for your health,
Ed Martin
Editor, House Calls