Despite federal government efforts to reduce them, dangerous infections are still common in pediatric intensive-care units, Consumer Reports said on Thursday.
A team at the nonprofit organization studied data from 92 pediatric ICUs across the country, a subset of PICUs that reported enough data to be statistically valid, and found only five of them had no bloodstream infections among patients in 2010. Some of the most prestigious hospitals had high rates, the team found.
But perhaps most disturbingly, only half of the 423 pediatric ICUs in the United States even had publicly available information on their bloodstream-infection rates—even though the Health and Human Services Department’s 2009 Action Plan to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections recommended they all track and report such data.
Starting in 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services required hospitals taking part in Medicare to report rates of central-line infections in adult intensive-care patients, or risk a 2 percent pay cut.
“Two pediatric ICUs—the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville and the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois—received Consumer Reports’ lowest rating, which means they reported central-line bloodstream infection rates more than twice as high as the national average,” the group said in a statement.
Some of the prestigious hospitals that got low ratings, meaning higher-than-expected levels of infection, included Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City; Tufts Medical Center in Boston; and Mayo Clinic at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minn.
The report notes that hospitals often defend their infection rates by saying they treat a poorer or sicker patient population than most other hospitals. But infection-control experts say how sick or poor a patient is should not be a factor in getting an infection in the hospital—something that comes down to simple hygiene.
“Every ICU, whether it’s a pediatric or adult unit, should be able to eliminate or at least dramatically reduce the number of hospital infections,” said Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. “The procedures to eliminate infections are simple, low-tech, and low-cost, relying for the most part on a change of mindset where the hospital staff comes to believe that an infection is never an acceptable outcome.”
See National Journal's report on the low-tech approach to curbing hospital infections.
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