Hospital-acquired infections
In yesterdays Daily sun (Jan. 1, 2015, page A4) there was a Q&A with the president and CEO of the Central Florida Health Alliance.
Q: What's the top accomplishment for 2014?
A: "We have been working for several years behind the scenes to decrease our hospital-acquired infections and improve our patient-safety ratings. And all of those began to be recognized by the outside national companies that look at these things and rank hospitals."
My comment: Having just read the book, "Missing Microbes", by Martin J. Blaser, MD, I learned that hospitals give people antibiotics before open heart surgery to prevent infection.
Is this how hospitals are dealing with the problem? What about other operations, do they get routine antibiotics too? Is this the reason why some hospitals are doing better? Is this the right way to go about preventing infections? I thought they had new special equipment to automatically disinfect rooms etc..
Lack of information leads to speculation: The newspaper is often full of statistics but there were none concerning the rate of infections. What percentage of patients had hospital-acquired infections in previous years compared to those in 2014? If there was truly significant improvement, why not let us in on the details and tell us how it was accomplished.
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