Many Infected in Hospitals
May 12, 2001
The risk of acquiring a serious infection while being treated in a hospital has risen over 35% in the last 20 years. As a result, many people who come into a hospital for treatment of one ailment leave the hospital with another. A study released today found that 2.2 million Americans contract an infection unrelated to their primary condition while staying in the hospital. Of these patients, nearly 90,000 die each year.
Hospitals are not the only places where such infections lurk. The study cited clinics, dialysis centers, and nursing homes as breeding grounds for infection. As managed care companies continue to push for shorter hospital stays, many sick people receive care in such secondary facilities, such as nursing homes. The infections that once roamed hospital corridors are now branching out into clinics, dialysis centers, and nursing homes. "The diversity of health care has changed enormously," says William Jarvis of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infections follow the people out of the hospitals and into secondary care facilities. "One thing common to all the settings is the need for infection control guidelines, surveillance, and prevention," Jarvis says.
Approximately 5% of those spending time in hospitals and nursing homes pick up infections unrelated to their primary condition. Some experts believe the rate of infection to be twice as high. "With the advent of managed care and the incentives to provide more outpatient care," says Richard Wenzel, chairman of the department of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, "it is not surprising that increasingly more ill people would comprise the population of modern hospitalized patients. For many larger institutions, the infection rate may be closer to 10%."
The Centers for Disease Control maintain that hospitals and other medical facilities can reduce the infection rate if they concentrate more on good sanitation practices.
-- Article Courtesy of InjuryBoard.com
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