The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a story on its front page detailing the enormous harm caused by infections in hospitals. According to a recent study published in the Journal of American Medical Association Internal Medicine, the annual cost of five common and preventable health-care-associated infections is $9.8 billion. Patients who acquire these preventable infections while in the hospital setting generally require longer hospital stays, often must undergo additional medical procedures and surgeries, face a much higher risk of long term health problems, and sometimes even die. This article does a good job of pointing out that these infections will be greatly reduced, or potentially eliminated all together, if hospitals implement and enforce some very easy and inexpensive policies and procedures, such as simply requiring medical providers to wash their hands before and after seeing a patient.
Although the Ohio medical malpractice attorneys at Rourke and Blumenthal are happy to see that hospitals in Ohio are making more of an effort to eliminate unnecessary infections, more needs to be done to prevent this problem. If you or a loved one has suffered significant medical problems due to a hospital acquired infection, please feel free to contact Rourke and Blumenthal for a free consultation.
Read the full Columbus Dispatch article, Infections Costing Hospitals, Patients here.
image by digidreamgrafix/freedigitalphotos.net