Posted on 04/16/2011 2:51:15 AM PDT by Scanian
Hospital infections kill more Americans each year than AIDS, car accidents and breast cancer combined -- and researchers are searching for solutions. This week, a study of 153 Veterans Affairs hospitals shows that doing a simple swab test to identify and isolate the few patients carrying infection-causing bacteria can save lives. It's called screening, but even more important is cleaning. Studies are rolling in that hospitals need to be cleaner.
In fact, if you're visiting a friend or relative in the hospital, don't bring flowers or candy -- take gloves and a canister of bleach wipes.
Hospitals do an inadequate job of cleaning rooms -- so germs left behind by past patients are lying in wait. Patients are at far greater danger of infection when placed in a hospital room where a previous patient had an infection. Hospitals won't tell you who occupied the room before you.
Alarming research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (March 28) demonstrates that a patient's risk of picking up the drug-resistant bug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is much higher if the previous occupant of the hospital room had it.
Being placed in a room where the last patient had Clostridium difficile, or C. diff for short, more than doubles the risk of getting that dreaded infection, according to a new study in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (March 2011). C. diff is the most common hospital infection in some parts of America.
Patients pick up invisible C. diff bacteria when they touch surfaces in their room, then eat a roll or cookie with their contaminated hands and swallow the bacteria along with the food.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
It's lawyers. When an action becomes preventative one can still be sued. So, do nothing and react to the problem when it appears.
My wife has been trying to get pro-biotic treatment instituted in her NICU for years. The docs are afraid of the lack of supporting data. So they all stare at each other wondering, 'Who's going to do it first' while pre-term babies get necroizing entero-colitis (NEC) and die.
I've had it with the presumption of "do no harm" because, too often, it's harmful.
I live in one of the most heavily unionized states in the nation. Most of the nurses and staff in my hospital are of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, or Hawaiian descent. (There are a half dozen of us round eyes.) All are union and all are US citizens.
THEY ARE EXCELLENT! The level of nursing care provided, their bedside manner is top notch. Their personal, human caring is touching.
Our DON (director of nursing) is retired military. He has instituted an infection control program that is maddening, but highly effective.
It isn't wise to make general statements about an entire profession.
Well most rooms and nursing stations have the hand sanitizer and gloves, if you are so inclined...I believe that would be prudentt oafford yourself with those accoupraments...
as soon as a patient is discharged, it goes up on this electronic board, and as soon as the people across town see that that bed is open, they're calling with an admission.....its like a rotating circus with little human touch.....
but they do clean the rooms well it seems...with germicide etc...
again, like you said....our hospital doesn't even get paid for a huge portion of its care, so there are no extra dollars to let rooms just sit open for a few hours....
and then there is Medicare/Medicaid that don't pay full cost and just expect to get by on their good looks I guess...
washing with soap and water is the recommendation for preventing the spreading C-diff......not alcohol or bleach, etc...
our housekeepers are mostly Russian or Asian and one Persian....they work hard...legal immigrants usually are very hard workers....they’re thankful to have a job and to be in this country...
Cheaper 'n dirt; we keep the small size bottles in both cars and wifey's purse.
Fortunately, our local hospitals have those little wall-mountain spritz stations throughout as well. They won't help with airborn gunk, but better than nothing.
You’re right about the third world workers. Just the other day I saw a couple of them walking into the hospital. They had long dreadlocks.
They complain that physicians’ ties covered with germs. Think of the germs that accumulate in dreadlocks and imagine having your dressings changed by someone with dreadlocks hanging over your open wound.
The particular hospitals I’m talking about are in Florida, Michigan, Oregon and California. Some are public and some are private...
I could name names, but I have already done that in regulatory complaints.
Yes, I do some work in hospitals... electronics and pneumatics for robotic surgeries.
Unions have really screwed up health care with their government granted monopoly and so have the insurance companies with their government complicity in ripping off the patients, the health providers...
I’d drop a big name on you that has been all over the Los Angeles news about a hospital district and tell you a little story, but I’ll wait for a conviction before I comment on the matter...
see #24...
oops...
see #29...
and I'll bet you have terrific pension and other benefits...most non profit nurses have neither...
I got admitted on Christmas Day for acute appendicitis and got sent to my room to wait on the surgery. First thing I noticed while lying on the bed was the dead flies on the light shields, so with a ruptured appendix I was standing up on the bed dumping out the dead flies from the lights, since I couldn’t stand the thought of staring up at those post-op. Good times!
No no no no no no. You can't use logic in a thread like this. Bad poster.
You bet wrong...
I work with arsine, boron fluoride, hydrofluoric and many other acids, caustics, oxidizers, radiant energy, and have HAZWOPER responsibilities (with confined space rescues), SCBAs, evacuations and the emergency first aid that comes with the territory in industrial accidents, DOT regulations, EPA regulations, etc., etc.,...
And, since I’m an engineering contractor, I have to deal with the insurance thieves (and insolent, negligent union thugs) who produce nothing and feed off of everyone’s misery.
Nurses are more likely (as an emergency room or critical care nurse) to get shot by an illegal alien gang banger wanting to finish the job on a victim who was most likely a previous partner in crime.
And while I do respect nurses (some of my friends are former army medics now in nursing), I know all the crazy stories about the union idiots who maliciously cause needless strife and trouble in the hospitals.
I still have my appendix and so far as I know it has never ruptured but I have had two flareups of appendicitis, one while on the USS Saratoga at sea. In either case there was no way I would have noticed a dead fly if it had been up my nose! The pain was some of the most intense I have ever experienced and accompanied by throwing up huge volumes of liquid that left me wondering how I could even have that volume in my body to throw up. There was zero possibility that I could have have stood up on a bed and removed dead flies from anything, it would have been inconceivable. I had extreme soreness in my abdominal muscles for a week afterward from all the heaving and curling up in a ball.
That is amazing that you didn’t have to have surgery, then.
My older brother had an attack when I was in diapers, he was four years old and my mother said he spent a week or more in the hospital and was given injections several times a day until he would start screaming at the sight of someone with a hypodermic in hand. He will be seventy in August and still has his appendix.
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