State law does not require Georgia hospitals to routinely share information about infection rates with the state's infectious disease experts. It requires hospitals to notify public health officials when they have an outbreak or identify certain infectious conditions, such as tuberculosis or acute hepatitis. But most of the infections patients pick up inside hospitals do not have to be reported, despite the danger to public health. About 1 in 20 hospitalized patients will contract an infection while receiving care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Georgia Department of Public Health used a federal grant to create a program to combat infections that patients often get while in hospitals, and officials hope that program will eventually allow statistical tracking. The federal government has begun work on a national tracking program that will eventually provide public data. But for now, identifying which hospitals and which conditions pose the biggest threat to Georgia patients is largely guesswork.
Federal officials and lawmakers, along with the drug industry and doctors' groups, are rushing to find remedies for critical shortages of drugs to treat a number of life-threatening illnesses, including bacterial infection and several forms of cancer.The proposed solutions, which include a national stockpile of cancer medicines and a nonprofit company that will import drugs and eventually make them, are still in the early or planning stages. But the sense of alarm is widespread. "These shortages are just killing us," said Michael Link, MD, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the nation's largest alliance of cancer doctors. "These drugs save lives, and it's unconscionable that medicines that cost a couple of bucks a vial are unavailable."
A long-awaited and highly critical federal government report on patient safety at Parkland Memorial Hospital will be released today at a special meeting of the hospital's board of managers. "We promised we would release it as soon as it was finished, and that's what we're doing," said Parkland spokeswoman April Foran. Two dozen teams of doctors, nurses, lawyers and other hospital employees have spent the last two weeks developing a plan to correct problems that federal healthcare inspectors said threatened patient safety at the Dallas County public hospital, she said. Investigators with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that Parkland put emergency room patients' lives at risk and failed to take sanitary measures, such as hand-washing, to prevent the spread of infection, according to an internal hospital memo circulated last week. Those were the most severe failures of nine regulatory violations found by CMS during a sweeping inspection of the hospital in July.
Doctors are notoriously bad at delivering that tough message: You are going to die. But a new study shows a short training program might help them communicate better about terminal cancer, giving the patient emotional support and involving his or her significant others. The work, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, assesses the first program designed specifically to improve doctors' communication skills when faced with patients whose disease turns out to be fatal. Doctors often try to avoid straight talk about their patients' outlook in this situation, note. Tanja Goelz, of the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, and her colleagues. Yet most patients and their families want realistic information, the researchers write. So they developed a training program involving a 1.5-day communication workshop and a 30-minute coaching session to improve the situation.
Nobody familiar with American medical care in the 21st century should be surprised that a 73-year-old woman can be minutes away from getting a painful collapsed vertebra filled with liquid plastic and it's impossible to say whether the procedure works, or how. It may be that Marcia Henry could get as much relief from injections of local anesthetic, from physical therapy or just from more time to heal as she will from the $3,137 "vertebroplasty" she's about to undergo at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. "The studies have been contradictory. Which one trumps which one? We don't know," says interventional radiologist Mary E. Jensen as she sits in a dimly lit X-ray viewing room and watches a colleague lay out a tray of instruments in a procedure suite next door. "It leaves the treating physician in a dilemma." American medical care is rife with such treatments, whose usefulness is uncertain not just to the doctors who deliver them but also to the patients who receive them.
Vowing to improve the health of Chicagoans and cut the government's soaring healthcare costs, Mayor Rahm Emanuel went to a sweaty fitness room in Humboldt Park on Tuesday to unveil a comprehensive health agenda that includes a citywide "wellness plan." As part of Emanuel's effort to launch initiatives in his first 100 days, the mayor and Health Commissioner Bechara Choucair presented a Healthy Chicago plan that outlines 12 priority areas -- and dozens of measurable health goals the leaders hope to achieve by 2020. The priorities include reduced tobacco use, obesity reduction and prevention, HIV prevention, adolescent health, cancer disparity reduction, better access to healthcare, healthy mothers and babies, communicable disease control and prevention, healthy homes, violence prevention, and public health infrastructure. Choucair says they have identified more than 120 strategies to address them. The leaders did not specify concrete sources of funding for all the programs outlined in the agenda but said they believed their aggressive plan would attract more outside funding by demonstrating the city's commitment to targeted, transparent and evidenced-based health improvement strategies.