Posted on 01/01/2009 10:11:16 PM PST by blueplum
"The strain of a once-innocuous staph infection that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics kills more people each year than the AIDS virus and in most cases is contracted in hospitals.
...SB 1058 will require hospitals to report infections such as MRSA to the Department of Health Services, effective Jan. 1."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Maybe medical professionals shouldn’t be shopping and everything else in their scrubs! Try going to the supermarket with out seeing 10 people dressed in scrubs.
and btw.....please point to one case where anybody contracted MRSA from someone's uniform....
for MRSA there is strict isolation with gowns, masks, gloves and possible eye shields....they are discarded each and every time you leave an isolation room...
we have a case where I work..the family member refuses to wear any protective gear..no gloves, no gown, nothing...this person comes and goes into the active MRSA room, uses the elevator, the bathrooms, goes to the cafeteria and refuses to take protective measures to protect we the staff and you the public, let alone the other sick patients....
and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it....legally, there is no way to force people to obey isolation techniques...
Superbug: What makes one bacterium so deadly
A more virulent version of MRSA is in the community already. AIDS is fairly well controlled by the newer drugs.
nick: I’ve seen the same thing and find it an extremely dangerous practice. But, you have to admit that it does make them look important.
cherry: >>”...we wear our uniforms to work and we wear them home...”<<
Why are you spreading germs from your contaminated ‘uniforms’ throughout the community? FYI, we are not impressed and view such behavior as reckless, to say the least. Take the five minutes and change into your street clothes for the sake of us common folks.
Before you start a flame war I must tell you that both my son and his wife are doctors AND that my wife nearly died from MRSP she contracted while in the hospital. So, save your breath if you plan to educate me us that it is safe to parade around town in your germ-ridden uniforms. Even a mechanic changes his clothes before going home.
I don’t see anything wrong with changing into sweats and stuffing the scrubs in a gym-bag. Maybe one benefit of the increased oversight is, nurses and aides could demand and get approval for a scrub-down trailer. I’d be for that, why not? Cheap enough.
now for contracting MRSA from cloth, people who share the same sheets can contract MRSA from each other. And MRSA can be spread by washing a patient’s clothing with other family members. If there was no chance of MRSA being carried on clothing, there would be no need for a gown, or washing patients’ clothing separately followed by a bleach rinse of the washing machine, right?
The family member that you speak of is most likely a walking MRSA carrier. He/she may have built a slight immunity if they’ve cared for the patient, or, more than likely, they are silent victims, not yet your patient, but most likely will be at some time in the future. Maybe if you look at it that way, your viewpoint of he/she will soften. (There IS a solution and that would be to offer them free MRSA screening and treatment, but maybe that’s just a pipe-dream.)
Point is, hospitals were the original source of MRSA and it’s time they cleaned their act up not only for patients, but for the safety of the hospital workers themselves. It’s going to take everyone cooperating and maybe changing routines and procedures. The alternative would be to immediately prohibit all MRSA carriers from performing health care; it would decimate our medical staffing. I’m hoping this new legislation will be helpful to nurses and aides in their role in preventing spread of MRSA, especially to themselves, and which I’m sure none of them would ever want to do intentionally to others.
best regards, blu
I highly doubt uniforms are the main vector, it would be hands splashed in sanitizers. Wash your hands with soap and water.
1
• MRSA can live for up to 7 months on dust
• MRSA can live for up to 8 weeks on a mop head
• MRSA can live for up to 9 weeks on cotton (towel)
• MRSA can live for up to 203 days (over 6 months) on a blanket
• MRSA can live on the skin of otherwise healthy individuals, with no symptoms
indefinitely
Door handles and toilet paper rolls I suspect would be equally contaminated, as would be hair and skin.
Because she doesn’t care and is one of the problems. She takes germs all throught the community and to her home.
DOCTORS HAVE lounges AND THEY WALK IN AND LEAVE WITH THE SAME STREET CLOTHES THEY HAD ON WHEN THEY CAME IN.
If you go to visit someone in the hospital, you are carrying all kinds of things on your person when you leave, no matter what. No one should ever do anything but go straight home and shower after visiting or working in a hospital...period.
That said, some of those you see in public in their scrubs are not healthcare professionals...anyone can buy scrubs at Sam's Club. But I do know that some people who work in Nursing Homes especially, who have a careless attitude.
MDR Acinetobacter calcoaceticus-baumanni complex was an issue for the wounded in Iraq.
All hospitals need more extensive containment training for scrub and OR techs. Patient visitation, as cruel as it sounds, needs to be restricted. Spider bites, as odd as it sounds is also suspect in some cases I have researched.
Hospitals with good infection control programs know about all (95+%) of their infections. Hospitals with poor infection control programs either don't know about them, or don't count them properly.
Hence, excellent programs will always report more infections to the state than poor ones.
This is already well-documented in Pennsylvania, which has been on thos idiotic crusade for 3 years.
In PA, there is NO CORRELATION between infections reported to the state and infections billed to Medicare. Some hospitals report every infection they have billed to Medicare, some report no infections that they have billed to Medicare, and many hospitals bill for many infections which they have not reported to the state.
WIthout enforcement, which would be amazingly expensive and has no possibility of happening, this is just another boondoggle.
When this is explained to the people who write these laws, they say, "Well, we have to do something. We'll just get the information (the corrupted, meaningless data) out there, and let the public decide".
Anyone entering or leaving should really go through a decontamination procedure. The facilities improvements and employee training costs a lot of money. If it were up to me, I would virtually end public access to certain hospital areas. It is not a pretty picture, but what you cannot see will kill you.
It is bad enough so many people were too lazy or too stupid to finish their antibiotic prescriptions which lead to a lot of the multidrug-resistent organisms, now many will be too lazy or too cheap to assist in the effort to contain them.
My father died in February 2007, not from the stroke he had, but from hospital acquired infections, including MRSA. He got every one of those infections from a local hospital. The doctors kept giving him stronger and stronger antibiotics, and my dad just got to the point that he couldn’t fight them off anymore. He died from a hospital-type of pneumonia, fighting for every breath.
Unlike the family you mentioned, we followed all the hospital isolation procedures when my dad was put on isolation, including gowns, masks, gloves. But we did have a problem with the hospital staff following the isolation procedures. My mother and I both have worked in the health care field as nursing assistants, in both hospitals and nursing homes. We know about isolation procedures. We observed many instances where staff entered my dad’s room to provide care for him without even gloves on, when plenty of gloves, etc. were right outside of his room. We had to remind some of the staff to following the isolation protocol. We even had to report them sometimes, although nothing to my knowledge was ever done. If I seem like I am criticizing all health care professionals, please don’t take it that way. I’m just saying that not all nurses, doctors, etc. follow their own procedures.
I’m all for ANY additional precautions to prevent hospital acquired infections, if there’s a chance that it may save a life. I had no idea that hospital acquired infections were so prevalent in hospitals until the nightmare with my dad. It is a lot worse now than 10 years ago, when I worked in a hospital; it’s become an epidemic. In the future, if I ever have to go to a hospital, nobody is even going to touch me until I see them wash their hands at the sink and put on a pair of gloves. That is, if I’m conscious. Am I going to be a difficult patient because of that? Maybe so. But I want to be able to walk out of that hospital better than when I came in, not worse like my poor dad.
I know exactly how you feel, I know exactly what you went through.
Bedsores are also an infection risk. I know a man that died from osteomyelitis he got as the result of the most egregious neglect. The bedsore exposed his lumbar spine. He had money and good insurance.
This happens to a greater extent in places like Florida where elderly patients have little or no family nearby to keep the heat on the staff to care for them attentively.
MRSA is more prevalent in the outside world than it is in Hospitals....usually it is brought into the hospital by the patienr.
Yes, my dad got a couple of bedsores too. He spent almost a year in the hospital. When the hospital would release him to the nursing home for therapy, he would only be at the nursing home a few days, his fever would spike up (due to the infections), and he’d have to be sent back to the hospital, where he would pick up other infections. It was a vicious cycle. He never was able to get any kind of physical therapy hardly. He was rendered too sick and weak from dealing with all those hospital acquired infections. And my dad was only 69 years old when he died. He worked all his life, was always strong, but he was no match for those terrible infections.
MSRP = MSRA
err.....make that MRSA. Too little sleep for two days.
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