Progress in Hospital Infection Control Is Still Far from Reality
If hospitals in Indiana and around the country have begun to feel the heat on their high infection rates, you have medical malpractice lawyers to thank for it. According to a government report released last week, there has been progress in this area, but some kinds of infections continued to increase.
According to the report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, infections like postoperative blood stream infections and urinary tract infections associated with the use of catheters, have risen over the past year. There was an 8% rise in the case of bloodstream infections. These are serious infections that can lead to a condition called sepsis, marked by high fever, shivering and seizures. There's also been an increase of 6% in catheter-related urinary tract infections in hospitals. Postoperative pneumonia rates were down by 4%, and rates of bloodstream infections caused by placing of catheters in central veins, were the same as the year before.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, progress in controlling hospital-acquired infection rates has been too slow. The problem has been in getting hospitals, doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to abandon their rigid approaches to infection control. Studies have shown that simple steps like hand hygiene, sterilization of equipment and use of checklists can prevent hospital-acquired infections. However, in many hospitals in Indiana and around the country, things are still done the way they were a decade ago.
This much is clear - If your hospital invests in sophisticated and aggressive new methods of infection control, you are less likely to have high infection rates in your facility, or come up against Indiana medical malpractice lawyers.
