The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council has released a hospital-specific report on hospital-acquired infections, which identifies the actual number of infections reported by Pennsylvania’s 168 general acute care hospitals. The first-of-its-kind report also includes information on mortality, average length of stay, and average charges for cases with and without hospital-acquired infections. Because completeness of reporting still varies across facilities, PHC4 believes this report is more appropriate to use as a tool to ask providers informed questions and as a baseline to measure individual hospital improvements over time rather than direct hospital-to-hospital comparisons.
The sources of hospital-acquired infections appear to be more strongly linked to poor infection control in hospitals than to how sick patients are when they are admitted, reports The Washington Post. Three new studies published in the American Journal of Medical Quality find that age and severity of illness were not risk factors for infection. David Nash, the journal’s editor and chairman of the department of health policy at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told the Post that hospital staff should take greater care in hand washing and wearing gowns during procedures, limiting operating room traffic, isolating patients, and using antibiotics sparingly. “It’s the process, not the patients,” he said.
