Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Hospital Closed to Public

On Sunday, the Victoria Hospital here in Prince Albert closed the fifth floor to any outsiders due to a bad bug loose on the ward. Then yesterday they closed the forth floor, for the same reasons. So I won't be on visitation rounds today.

Then this morning I read that, "In one Australian medical study, doctors self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry 9 percent."

The piece continued: "In its 2000 report “To Err Is Human,”? the Institute of Medicine estimated that anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors ”? more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer ”? and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections."

Hmm, washing hands is all you need.

The article described a program they established where they give Starbucks coupons to anyone they found washing their hands. This increased the washing to 80%.

Seems like this should be kind of common knowledge to hospital staff. But fear and a lack of recognition of the problem exists.

Still, even here it looks like a chunk of hospital staff are not showing up for their shifts. They are calling in "Sick."

The article is here.

4 comments:

  1. That's it. From now on when I am in the hospital I am making my doctor wash his hands in front of me. And my nurses. If they don't like it then they don't touch me.

    ... And I'm gonna do it at his office too, especially when I bring my kids in there.

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  2. Yeah, watching "The 99 Most Bizzare Medical Mistakes" last evening was, and always is, rather disturbing and disconcerting. You might think that those health care personelle who want to help might realize how much harm they might be causing through laziness.

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  3. Okay I just have offer a bit of a defense here....

    It is not 'laziness'. Really it isn't. I can guarantee from a nursing perspective it is not laziness. If handwashing is missed, it might be because Mr. A is about to take a nose dive out of his bed, Ms. B is starting to throw up, Mr. C's family is demanding to speak to you right at that moment, 3 call lights are going off (most likely they all need to go to the bathroom - you try waiting 20 minutes to go pee when you really really really have to go), the ward clerk is demanding you come answer the phone, the doctor is looking for you because s/he wants to do an exam and needs an escourt right now. You may scoff at this, but this a daily reality on many hospital floors. You try the best you can to use the waterless soap hand sanitizer and gloves, but do you stop to wash your hands or do you catch Mr. A as he is about to hit the floor? And as a family member and that was your dad, would you be okay with the nurse stopping to wash hands while he fall to the floor and fractured his hip? How about Ms. B vomitting? Are you going to be happy if that was you and the nurse stopped to wash her/his hands while you are throwing up on yourself?

    There are many sides to the hand washing dilemna. Do not mistake me, I am an advocate for handwashing - you would be hard pressed to find a nurse that doesn't have some degree of germ phobia - and most health proffessionals are.

    Don't think because it gets overlooked that it is because of 'laziness'. Laziness has nothing to do with it. I can't help but as a nurse take some offense at that.

    Beck it is your right to ask doctor/nurse to wash their hands in front of you, but maybe just think how demeaning it is for them as it suggests they aren't professional enough to do it before they came into the room.

    Just some thoughts....

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  4. Yeah, I"ve seen the nursing staff first hand just trying to keep up to the demands placed on them. The fourth and fifth floor here are like that. That may also be one of the reasons they are frustrated enough not to want to show up for work on these days of high stress and high risk to illness. Morale isn"t great.

    The report I linked to makes a distinction between the Doctors and the rest of the staff. In the study it"s the doctors who have a wrong perception of how often they wash up. The study"s conclusions on the reasons for this make sense to me.

    I realize it oversimplifies things, but I suspect that if the nurses were not short staffed, they would have more time to do all the things they need to do, thus even hospital closures like this could diminish.

    And no, I wouldn"t expect my Doctor to wash his hands in front of me. I expect him to be professional and do his job well. Maybe that"s naive, but for now that"s what I"m comfortable with.

    Course, having said that, I seem to recall that my Doctor washes his hands in the examination room right in front of me, before he comes at me. Hmm, I wonder if he does that for me physically or psychologically. Probably both.

    No, the expectations placed on nursing staff these days are unbelievable. I have friends and relatives who are nurses, and their stories are, well sometimes just amazing.

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