News tagged with 'Hospital Acquired Infections'

Hospitals could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars if they acted like the top five hospitals in the U.S., according to HealthGrades.

A new study finds that about 48,000 Americans die from infections acquired in the hospital, and that raises the cost of health care by billions of dollars. These are not infections that individuals would have caught had they not been hospitalized, says the study from Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The Seattle Times finds that no one is tracking the explosion in MRSA rates and there is no consistent policy for screening for the staph infection in hospitals.  Testing and isolation of infected patients and carriers is the only way of containing the infection as well as washing your hands.