You might think that going to your local hospital for a routine procedure, having your baby or appendicitis, is completely safe. Well, think again. According to recent research, this is not at all the case. There are many, far too many diseases in hospitals that make you sick instead of healthy.
In healthcare institutions, it seems that there are many diseases looming freely. These range from bacterial illnesses, to fungal and viral ones. These can be acquired in some cases just by simply entering a hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office.
The Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center director, Doris Peter, laments the situation, saying that it is not normal for so much death to happen in places where people expect to get healthier, not worse off. The greatest problem, he says, is that this contributes to the general insecurity and fear of going to the hospital some people have. It gives them a good reason to refrain from resorting to medical personnel for their needs.
Trying to help people make better choices when going to the hospital, Peter’s institution on Wednesday, July 29th, released a report cataloguing all infections that had started inside hospitals, rating the safety of the institutions accordingly.
The results are frightening, and Peter says that the numbers must not be ignored by the health officials of the U.S. and neither by the hospitals themselves, who should try to reduce the number of infections down to a minimum. In 2011, the last year the CDC released records for, there were 721,800 infections for 648,000 patients. That equals an average of 1.11 infections per patient, which entails that some patients definitely got more than one infection from a healthcare center, while some probably got even three separate infections.
Another worrying statistic released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that over 200 American citizens die every day from these diseases while still admitted in the hospital. And prestigious medical centers like the Johns Hopkins Hospital of Maryland, or the Ronald Reagan UCLA in LA had one too many cases of indoor infections.
On the other hand, there are hospitals where stricter rules are followed to the book, and where the rate of infection for MRSA or C.diff – very potent, infectious, and ugly diseases – went down to zero.
Still, hospitals such as those mentioned above complained that the statistics are unfair since the number of patients per hospital is not taken into account, and say that their rates of infection are far less worrying when you look at the whole picture. Peter concludes the report by saying that these institutions should contact Consumer Reports and signal the irregularities.
Image source: usanews.com
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