The Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center supports telling the public about its infection rates, despite the medical center having Pennsylvania's highest infection rate in a recent report.
The report looks at infections that strike patients after they enter the hospital, and nearly five out of every 100 patients came down with an infection at Hershey. The authors of the report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council warned people not to use the infection rates to make harsh judgments or compare hospitals, saying the process of reporting infections is complicated and new. Some hospitals might not even be detecting or reporting all of their infections, the council added.
At the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America's annual meeting in Orlando, FL, the medical director of Infection Control at North Carolina's Pitt County Memorial Hospital said a program is making significant progress in reducing the number of patients bringing MRSA into the hospital. The hospital made a considerable investment in its "search and destroy" approach to MRSA, totaling $950,000 for new technology, kits and employees, according to the report. PCMH has the ability to run 30 MRSA tests at a time in its detection system for up to 150 tests per day.
Milford (MA) Regional Medical Center has reached out to its non-medical personnel and volunteers to encourage them to wash their hands while moving about the hospital and installed hand sanitizing stations near patients' rooms to encourage visitors to keep their germs away from hospitalized loved ones. The hospital is now trying to take its in-house campaign outside its borders to towns within its service area.
Two recent federal reports on hospital quality agreed that hospitals in Florida, on average, fall below the national norm. Hospital care in Florida was rated "weak" relative to the rest of the country by the congressionally mandated Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Just days later, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services posted patient-satisfaction scores on its Web site for virtually every U.S. hospital. On average, Florida hospitals lagged the nation in all of the 10 listed categories-from patients' overall rating of their hospital experience to their satisfaction with staff communication, pain management and room cleanliness.
This commentary in the The Washington Times says that the hospital-acquired infection rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Infection are much lower than reality. The CDC claims 1.7 million people contract infections in U.S. hospitals each year, but new facts discredit this estimate, the author writes.
It's been more than eight years since To Err is Human detailed just how deadly hospital errors can be to patients, writes the director of the Center for Medical Consumers in this op-ed piece, but progress in changing the likelihood of a patient being harmed has been just too slow. The error epidemic is not just costly in lives lost: The economic impact is estimated to be between $17- and $29 billion dollars as a result of lost income as well as disability and healthcare costs, he writes.
Alliance (OH) Community Hospital has announced that it will offer patients from the Ohio-based facilities Mercy Medical Center, Robinson Memorial Hospital or Salem Community Hospital $100 or more to hand over their bills and corresponding "explanation of benefits." Alliance representatives said the offer is part of the hospital's attempt to provide consumers with more information about the true cost of medical services. The hospital will eventually share the information on a new Web site.
A YouTube video showing Philippine doctors laughing while removing an object from a patient may lead to charges against the surgeons and cost them their medical licenses. The government-run Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in the central city of Cebu, where the surgery took place, is conducting an investigation. Jose Sabili, MD, president of the Philippine Medical Association, said the group will conduct an investigation if a formal complaint is filed and doctors found violating medical ethics could be suspended or expelled from the association. The move would result in the suspension or termination of their state health insurance accreditation as well.
Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle has revised its expansion plans in response to comments by a citizens committee appointed by the city to review the hospital's growth plan. The plan would more than double the number of beds and building sizes on its main campus over the next two decades.
The Florida Senate has passed a measure that backers hope will allow the uninsured to get cheap healthcare coverage. The plan would give some of the nearly 4 million uninsured Florida residents the chance to get no-frills health insurance for as little as $150 a month. Only people between ages 19 and 64 would be eligible, and the bill would make the insurance cheaper by allowing participating health plans to cut back on the number of procedures and treatments they are typically required to cover.
