How Safe is Your Hospital?
While attention has been focused recently on MRSA, another stealthy superbug has been creeping up on hospitals.
So successfully has it taken a grip that clostridium difficile now contributes to the deaths of four times as many people as MRSA.
I was astounded to learn from Professor Brendan Wren, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, that the equivalent of one person every hour is dying in our hospitals with c.difficile.
These are mostly people who came into hospital to be treated for one thing, only to be felled by a preventable hospital infection.
As hospitals struggle to contain this bug, we were given unprecedented access to a trust in which 90 people died of c.difficile, with over 1100 people infected. Read more
Website Lets Users Compare Hospital Ratings
Planning surgery anytime soon? Georgians can now check how hospitals in their area rate in terms of user satisfaction, a major step toward consumers one day shopping for health care as they would for a household appliance. As a group, Georgia hospitals rank slightly above the national average on patient satisfaction, according to a recently expanded Web site from the federal agency that runs Medicare.
Discharged patients, randomly selected, were asked to give a number grade to their hospital care on a scale of 1 to 10. The surveys also asked how well nurses and doctors communicated with patients, and whether they received adequate information about their care after discharge.
There’s wide variation in the scores of Atlanta area hospitals. Piedmont Hospital did best, with 78 percent of its patients rating it a 9 or 10. The hospital in Buckhead, along with affiliated facilities in Fayetteville and Jasper, took three of the four top positions among hospitals in a 23-county area. Read more
