Hospitals cut infections, but still have room for improvement

Hospitals cut infections, but still have room for improvement:

Hospitals got better at preventing four common and deadly hospital-acquired infections last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And our updated hospital Ratings show similar results. But there’s still plenty of room for improvement, and a need for broader access to data, say our hospital-infection experts.

The CDC said that in 2010 hospitals reported, on average, 33 percent fewer bloodstream infections in critical-care patients, 18 percent fewer MRSA infections, 10 percent fewer surgical-site infections, and 7 percent fewer urinary-tract infections related to catheters compared with a national baseline. Those improvements put hospitals on target for meeting goals of a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of bloodstream infections and MRSA infections by 2013, the CDC says.

John Santa, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, says:

That’s progress. But research shows that bloodstream infections can be eliminated, so that should be the goal for all hospitals.

Moreover, the CDC says that hospitals are still lagging at preventing surgical-site infections as well as infections of Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can lead to potentially deadly gastrointestinal infections.

The director of Consumer Reports’ Safe Patient Project, Lisa McGiffert, says that public-reporting laws were instrumental in kick-starting the movement to end hospital-acquired infections, “but we are just measuring the tip of the iceberg, and we need to move more quickly. Too many people are dying and being injured!”

Bottom line: Our updated hospital Ratings also showed an overall reduction in infection rates, based on data from the nonprofit Leapfrog Group. Specifically, the average number of such infections among every 1,000 days that patients had central lines in intensive care units dropped from 1.5 in 2009 to 1.2 in 2010, a 25 percent improvement.

For details, see our updated hospital Ratings, including information on bloodstream infections and staying safe in the hospital.

Source

National Targets and Metrics Monitoring Progress Toward Action Plan Goals: A Mid-Term Assessment [Department of Health and Human Services]

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