There is a growing movement that no longer accepts hospital-acquired infections as inevitable complications of health care. The most recent figures available from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council saw the annual rate for all infections drop 8 percent.
Pennsylvania is one of the states that requires reporting of all hospital-acquired infections. It shows that coercive legislation helps, forcing hospitals to be more accountable to their patients. Twenty six states now have laws requiring hospitals to reports rates of infections. The Consumer Union association lead the battle with its campaign «Stop infections».
Other measures, often initiated at the local level by a doctor and his/her team, have proven extraordinarily effective and adopted by others.
These measures are:
* use of a simple checklist for a common procedure. The checklist is now being adopted in all 50 states and three countries: the United Kingdom, Spain and Peru
* raising the head of the bed for patients on ventilators, brushing patients' teeth and taking other precautions have dramatically reduced ventilator-associated pneumonia, another common and costly infection.
* financial incentives to cut infections: "As of Oct. 1, 2008, Medicare no longer pays hospitals for the added costs incurred by patients who develop catheter-related urinary tract infections and other catheter- or surgery-related infections.
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