As tonight's Bill of Health segment points out, hospital-acquired infections (insiders use the acronym HAI) are a major problem. They result in the deaths of nearly 100,000 patients a year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. This problem is vexing because not all hospital infections originate in the same manner.
Many HAIs develop because people fail to wash their hands, but other HAIs have little to do with handwashing. Improperly cleaned artificial respirators can cause an infection to develop in patients' lungs. Also, some patients develop blood infections after catheter tubes and other probes are placed into the body. More than 20,000 people die a year, according to one federal estimate, because of these catheter-related infections.
With so many causes of hospital-acquired infections, experts say increased handwashing is but one of a number of responses hospitals need to implement. For instance, new studies suggest using fewer catheters or changing them out more frequently, along with improved disinfection of the patient's skin around the catheter insert, will help reduce the number of deaths from catheter-related infections.
Information on HAIs is getting better, but the data can still be hard to come by. The Centers for Disease Control maintains a surveillance-database of HAIs, but reporting of such infections by hospitals is done on a voluntary basis. To date, only a couple states - Florida and Pennsylvania - require hospitals to report infection incidents. Florida's infection data can be accessed at www.floridacomparecare.gov, while Pennsylvania's can be accessed at www.phc4.org/hai.
Comments
The conventional thinking is that most nosocomial infections are caused by poor bare hand hygiene. I believe that most nosocomial infections are spread by the gloved hands of healthcare workers, who pick up pathogens within the patient room by touching contaminated surfaces, clothing, instruments, and the patients themselves etc. and spread them to susceptible sites on the patients. The chance for spreading disease happens each time the patient is touched. The ideal solution is to have a bedside instant sanitizer that enables hand hygiene just before every touch.
My company, Germgard has developed and patented equipment that in seconds sanitizes gloves on the hands of the healthcare workers, 4 log reduction, without compromising the skin which is a major compliant amongst nurses. In fact it can be demonstrated that sanitizing the gloved hand is much easier to accomplish than sanitizing the bare hand. Perhaps it will be easier to wear gloves and sanitize the surface of them before each patient touch than to sanitize the difficult surface of a bare hand.
By focused efforts on gloved hand hygiene, many lives will be saved and there be a huge economic benefit to hospitals.