"474 Infected in Mass. Hospitals in Year, State Says", written by Liz Kowalczyk, was published on April 15, 2010 in the Boston Globe. According to this article, 71 out of the 73 Massachusetts hospitals had infection rates at or below the national average in a one year time span. This report only included bloodstream infections from iv lines throughout the whole year, and surgical site infections from hip and knee operations for only a portion of the year. A few hospitals had higher infection rates than what was expected to occur. One of the hospitals' "disease trackers" said that the whole reason they do these reports is to recognize there is a problem and to fix it, which they did, since neither hospital has seen an infection in months. The CDC estimated that each year there are two million infections received from hospitals, and 99,000 of these are/will be fatal.
Reporting the number of hospital-causing infections is important to help hospitals eliminate infections entirely. Doctors are happy to have their hospitals cause less infections than other hospitals, but they say their goal is to eliminate them completely. “You may be better than the national average, but that still means there are a whole bunch of people getting hurt,’’one doctor stated. Massachusetts hospitals also released information on how many "serious reportable events" they had in 2009; 383 events.
This article relates to something that we talked about in class about polio. We said that more people were getting polio because their environments were so sterile and they were not getting the natural exposure to the bacteria necessary to become immune. This article made me think of this because hospitals are known to be extremely sterile and clean, but in this article it talks about people getting infections from something inside the hospital. These two are not exactly alike or related, but this article made me think of our polio unit in that respect.
I thought this article was very interesting since when I think of hospitals, infections and "serious reportable events" caused by being in a hospital don't usually cross my mind. I was really surprised to see that so many incidences occur in a year, not just in hospitals in Massachusetts, but all over the country. In the article, one of the "serious reportable events" listed was a surgeon leaving a piece of equipment, such as a scalpel, inside of their patient. When I read this, I didn't know how to react. I had no idea surgeons could be so careless as to leave something like that inside a patient; it worried me.
After reading this article, some questions came to my mind. How were the hospitals planning on reducing the number of infections even more? What happened with the surgeons who were careless, did they get fired? What will hospitals do if the number of infections continually rises instead of decreases? If this report counted all kinds of infections instead of just two, would the numbers be much higher? Why doesn't the report include more types of infections?
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The surgeon who left the scalpel inside the patient probably did get fired; as for any others, it would depend on the magnitude of their mistake.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the article was very well linked to polio—back in the first half of the century, any occurrence of the disease was a “serious reportable event.” Also, each era shows a great concern for the statistics of misery. The documentaries showed several images of infection and death rates posted outside clinics; now, we have competitions to decrease the rate of infection. And of course, as the doctor in your article put it, Molly, none of it matters because people are dying anyways.
As far as the contents of the report go, I would hazard a guess that those are very common types of infection, and that other rates of hospital infection are too small to be comparable, or perhaps less under the control of the practicing team.
I think this article is really good because it is very important that our local hospitals are being checked up on and tested for statistics and rates compared to other hospitals in America. This article was a great choice to use for our class blog because it relates so much to Massachusetts residents.
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