PITTSBURGH
(AP) — No one federal agency tracks hospital infections, which
infect more than 2 million people and kill nearly 100,000
annually, and only Pennsylvania and Illinois require reporting
of hospital-acquired infections, a newspaper reported.
"You
have these infections that are out of control and no one is
paying attention," Dee Dee Vallier of Hood River, Ore., told
the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for Sunday's editions. Her husband
is disabled after developing a staph infection following back
surgery.
Vallier wants the government to put hospital infections on
the National Notifiable Infectious Diseases list, a federal
roster of 60 illness categories that threaten public health.
The newspaper reported that 30 states track a handful of infectious
diseases that medical experts say are commonly acquired in
hospitals, but hospitals are not required to report what caused
the infections. In addition, hospitals that report infections
are not identified.
"When we don't do a good job in dealing with infection rates
in hospitals, that's not only a potential tragedy for those
persons who are infected but it also means that we are providing
duplicative care that drives up the cost of health care,"
said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat who sponsored
the state's law to report hospital infections.
The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, the
agency charged with collecting infection data, recently voted
to scale back a plan approved in November after the state's
hospital group said the original plan would be a hardship.
Instead of tracking 14 types of infections, it will monitor
four.
The Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, a
group of more than 200 hospitals in the state, argued that
infections should be reported on a limited basis and that
reporting programs would be expensive.
Other than Pennsylvania and Illinois, there has been no activity
nationwide to put hospital infection reporting on the fast
track, the newspaper reported.
Illinois hospitals report three categories of infections:
surgical site infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia
and central-line-related bloodstream infections. Data collection
there began Jan. 1.
Other states have resisted addressing the issue partly because
the prevalent thinking is that an infection is a medical anomaly
that's difficult to interpret.
"Two surgeons could look at the same wound, and one would
say it's infected and another would say it's not infected,"
said Dr. Alfred DeMaria, the state epidemiologist in Massachusetts.
People who oppose making infection rates public also contend
that some hospitals treat older and sicker patients who are
more likely to develop infections.
Consumers groups argue that reporting infections would improve
the quality of their care, especially because government statistics
show that half of hospital-acquired infections are preventable.
Reporting would enable hospitals to identify infection control
procedures, said Charles Inlander, a Pennsylvania health and
consumer advocate who serves on a national health care quality
panel for the Institute of Medicine.
"Are they out of line with other facilities? Is there continuous
improvement? That's the whole idea," he said.
