Now, the casualties once referred to as the "cost of doing business" have decreased from 7.7 percent to 1.4 percent in Michigan hospitals over an 18 month period. Doctors and hospital staff have followed simple procedures to ensure that infections from administering intravenous drugs are preventable.
Dr. Peter Provonost, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told United Press International, "We look at infections in the intensive care unit as "defects" and our goal is to eliminate them much the way Microsoft would develop a "patch" to overcome a bug in its program or General Motors would "recall" an automobile for a manufacturing problem."
Dr. Provonost explains in a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the two year long experiment throughout 100 local hospitals has proven successful.
He explained, "We set out to find evidence-based practice changes that were feasible to perform in the intensive care setting and then tried to make it a team approach to reduce infections."
As many as 17,000 patients die a year as a result of blood infections from bacteria in intravenous drugs.
Under the new plan, doctors and nurses are required to take simple measures, such as removing unnecessary catheters as soon as possible, cleansing the skin surface with chlorhexidine and placing catheters in the chest or neck rather than the groin.
Dr. Michael Edmond, co-author of an editorial that will accompany Dr. Provonost's report in the journal, says, "This story is compelling and the costs and efforts so relatively minor that the five components of intervention should be widely adopted. We can no longer accept the variations in safety culture, behavior or systems of practice that have plagued medical care for decades."
Dr. Provonost says that Rhode Island will be adopting the same procedures in their intensive care units and he is meeting with the World Health Organization to make the cautions mandatory in other countries.
