I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Hospital-acquired infections increased nationwide in 2009 despite growing awareness about the problem and moves to improve medical practices, the nation’s health secretary said Tuesday.
“In 2009, healthcare associated infections increased and minorities were less likely to have insurance and less likely to get the treatments they needed,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius said in a statement this week that coincided with the release of an annual health quality report.
The 2009 Healthcare Quality Report described hospital-acquired infections as one of the most serious patient safety concerns.
“‘They are the most common complication of hospital care. An estimated 1.7 million HAIs occur each year in hospitals, leading to about 100,000 deaths. The most common infections are urinary tract, surgical site, and bloodstream infections,’” according to the 162-page report.
Advocates pushing for a reduction in hospital-acquired infections say such improvements also will lower medical costs. Some medical researchers estimate that hospital-acquired infections add billions of dollars a year to health care costs because it lengthens patients’ time in ICUs.
As an example, in 2006, just two conditions caused by hospital-aquired infections in the U.S. (sepsis and pneumonia), were responsible for nearly 50,000 deaths and cost more than $8 billion to treat, according to a February report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The move to tamp down on hospital infections got much of its impetus from a 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To Err is Human,” which estimated that up to 98,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries occur annually in the U.S. because of medical errors and infections.
Meanwhile, early results from hospitals with active surveillance programs, including at Veterans Administration facilities, have shown marked reductions in different types of infections – the invasive MRSA infections. That heightened surveillance is accompanied by a campaign to improve medical practices, including checklists that exhort health care professionals to wash hands more often and disinfect the patient’s skin before attaching a central line to a patient.
