Tag: hospital stay

Hospitals and Stories of Tragedy and Triumph

Every day, hospitals are fields of frustrating sadness, minutes of genuine joy, hours of anxious expectation and deep doubt about the road ahead. When you stroll into the main gates of a hospital, none of the grasping dramas that are unfolding within are obvious. You see individuals in electric motorized wheel chairs awaiting trips, volunteers guiding lost individuals to the correct side and employees talking as they wait for coffee.

But like any hospital, go a little further and you will be confused by experiences of human tragedy and triumph, pain and discomfort, hope and even happiness. The individuals who work there have devoted their careers to helping others and offering the best proper care possible. The sufferers who are resting in mattresses and close relatives and friends who sit at their bedsides don’t want to be there, for the most part. Some are making an effort to recover and leave, while others are too sick or weak and have nowhere else to go. Every day is a fight, whether you are a health-care employee or patient. And it’s easy to forget once you escape to the bigger world outside.

Hospitals are not generally fun places to be. They are, as one physician advised me, where sick individuals hang out. Many surfaces have an unmistakable, yet somehow unidentifiable, distressing scent. If you are a patient, you may have to share a room with a perfect stranger who keeps you up all night moaning in discomfort. Front line health-care employees do the best they can with restricted resources, aging facilities and less-than-ideal operating circumstances. But it’s obvious there are methods we can also do better. Finding the way forward, that is the challenge.

Hospital Infections and Their Cost

Infections obtained in the hospital cost the U.S. medical care system $10 billion dollars a year, new results display. Past analysis have placed the yearly price of dealing with those infections at $20 billion dollars to $40 billion dollars, so the new figures show improvement is being made, Dr. Eyal Zimlichman of The Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the new study’s writers, informed Reuters Health. Nevertheless, he said, much more can be done.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, about one in every 20 put in the hospital contract a hospital-acquired disease. Zimlichman and his group analyzed 26 studies to recognize the expenses associated with dealing with the five most typical, expensive and avoidable infections among hospitalized patients. Bloodstream infections from central lines, which are long pipes placed in a large vein such as in the stomach area or arm to provide drugs, liquids, nutrients or blood products, were the most expensive, at a price of $45,814 per case. Ventilator-associated pneumonia, or a bronchi ailment that produces while a person is on a respirator, came in second, at $40,144 per case.

Post-surgery infections happening at the site of the operation cost $20,785 per patient. Infection with Clostridium difficile, a tough-to-treat bacteria that causes serious diarrhea and can spread within hospital units, cost $11,285 per case. UTIs were the least expensive, at $896 per case. About 441,000 of these infections happen among hospitalized adults in the U.S. every year, for a sum total of $9.8 billion dollars, Zimlichman and his co-workers revealed in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Post surgery infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia each included about one third of the total expenses. That was followed by central line bloodstream infections (about 19 percent), C. difficile infections (15 percent) and UTIs, which included less than 1 % of all expenses. Up to 70 % of central line infections and ventilator-associated pneumonias can be avoided if the medical care group dealing with the individual follows a guideline of best practices included Pronovost, who did not take part in the new analysis. Patients can secure themselves by asking a hospital about their infection rates and what they are doing to decrease them, he said.

Cause of Hospitalization from Nursing Homes

A primary cause of hospitalizations from nursing homes, discussed in industry literature for more than 20 years, is the inadequate health professional employment levels in nursing homes. Last fall, the Kaiser Family Foundation released two studies about the hospital stay of elderly care facility citizens. Their findings about why elderly care facility citizens are hospitalized confirm earlier research in this field and point to the need to increase health professional employment in nursing homes as a way to improve quality of care in assisted living features and reduce hospital stay and re-hospitalization of patients.

The Kaiser study, “Financial Incentives in the Long-Term Care Context: A First Look at Relevant Information” determined the economical incentives that encourage hospital stay of elderly care facility citizens.[6]  These incentives include Medicare payment policies for doctors, skilled assisted living features, and hospice services as well as the dual roles of healthcare director and attending physician frequently being held by the same individual.

A companion study, based on interviews with doctors, nurses, social workers, and close relatives of residents, determined 10 factors that encourage hospital stay of elderly care facility residents: the limited capacity of assisted living features to address healthcare issues; physicians’ preference for inpatient settings; concerns with liability for not hospitalizing; economical incentives for doctors and facilities; inability of assisted living features to address residents’ healthcare needs; lack of relationship between facility staff, doctor, and family; lack of advance care planning; family preference; and behavioral health problems. Although several factors impact a decision to hospitalize an elderly care facility resident, a key factor determined in the Kaiser reviews and other studies mentioned is the lack of sufficient professional and paraprofessional medical staff in nursing homes.  The insufficient employment in assisted living features has been recognized for a long period.