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tj444 -> RE: American Health Care Killed My Father (1/18/2014 11:34:05 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
You say this as if its interesting or new.
A NY liberal who produces a TV show (ie, has no background in medicine) says its easy to stop people dying of infections.
So while I agree that thousands of people die from hospital acquired illnesses, I have also happened to read the protocolsl the hospitals are using to try to control infection.
They are NOT simple, and they are spending millions of dollars. Hospitals have UV machines that irradiate rooms to kill infectious agents. Some use copper in their light plates and touch surfaces as it controls infections. They have protocols for hand-washing.
So I think his prescriptions in this area are know-nothing. A lot of the other things I agreed with. But there's nothing really new...
it was not simply him saying this, he was saying a critical care specialist was saying this, one of those on the front line.. I believe this is the article he referred to in the vid.. It is not just knowing what you are supposed to do, its doing it and not skipping steps.. this was just one problem- line infections- that is being illustrated showing that hospitals need to up their game..
"In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check. These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.
The next month, he and his team persuaded the hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask them each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary. This was revolutionary. Nurses have always had their ways of nudging a doctor into doing the right thing, ranging from the gentle reminder (“Um, did you forget to put on your mask, doctor?”) to more forceful methods (I’ve had a nurse bodycheck me when she thought I hadn’t put enough drapes on a patient). But many nurses aren’t sure whether this is their place, or whether a given step is worth a confrontation. (Does it really matter whether a patient’s legs are draped for a line going into the chest?) The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn’t follow every step on the checklist, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all
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