By Karen Garloch
Infections
acquired in hospitals cause a lot of added pain and expense for
patients. But in the Carolinas, and in most other states, it's
impossible to find out if the hospital you're entering has an abnormal
infection rate.
Pennsylvania
-- thanks to a 20-year effort by a coalition of business and labor
leaders tired of paying more for health care of unknown quality -- was
the first state to require hospitals to report infection rates and make
them public.
It is one of only 14 states to have passed laws requiring hospitals to report rates of hospital-acquired infections.
As
Pennsylvania recently released its second annual report, the American
Journal of Medical Quality published three studies, providing new
evidence that hospitals could prevent many of the growing number of
infections if they practiced better hygiene.
The
studies independently concluded that, despite hospitals' claims, it's
not true that infections are inevitable in the sickest patients.
Researchers found that infections acquired in the hospital arise mainly
from poor hygiene during hospital procedures, not from how sick
patients were when they were admitted.
"Hospital-acquired
infections should not be viewed as inevitable," said Marc Volavka,
executive of the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council.
"The simple fact is that every patient that enters the hospital in
Pennsylvania and in this country is at risk for a hospital-acquired
infection."
For
years, Volavka said, epidemiologists have debated what qualifies as a
hospital-acquired infection and argued that statistics aren't good
enough to report to the public.
But Volavka and the Pennsylvania council, which he has led since 1988, kept pushing.
The
definition of a hospital-acquired infection is simple, he said: "You
didn't come into the hospital with it, and you got it in the hospital."
Data may not be complete, but it will never be complete until you start collecting it and making it public, he said.
For
example, in 2005, when Pennsylvania's 2004 infection data were
published, 11,668 patients reportedly got hospital-acquired infections.
In 2006, the number jumped to 19,154.
"That
wasn't because Pennsylvania hospitals had more infections," he said. It
was because "more hospitals complied with the law."
The
council still doesn't believe it's getting complete data, but it's
getting better. "We made, I think, an important judgment not to let the
perfect be the enemy of the good," he said. "The data will never be
perfect."
Will the Carolinas follow?
This
year, the S.C. legislature passed a reporting requirement that takes
effect in 2008. The first report will be issued in February 2009.
A
similar bill, facing opposition from the N.C. Hospital Association,
died in the N.C. legislature in 2005. But Rob Thompson of N.C. Public
Interest Research Group will try again in 2007.
Meanwhile,
many hospitals responded to infection concerns by installing dispensers
of hand cleanser in patient rooms. Doctors and nurses at Carolinas
Medical Center are instructed to "foam in and foam out" as they enter
and leave. The same is true at Presbyterian Hospital, which employs a
nurse to monitor the staff's hygiene habits.
If you're a patient, or visiting a patient, do your part. Don't be shy about asking: "Did you wash your hands?"
