NHS Meltdown: Hospital Acquired Infection Deaths Skyrocket
What passes for health care these days in the UK keeps going from bad to worse. The latest bad news is a surge in deaths caused by hospital acquired infection. From The Guardian story:
The response of the NHS is typically weak:A 72% increase in deaths linked to the hospital superbug Clostridium difficile was disclosed yesterday by the Office for National Statistics.
It said the infection, which causes severe diarrhoea among patients whose resistance has been weakened by antibiotics, was mentioned on 6,480 death certificates in England and Wales in 2006, compared with 3,757 in 2005. More than half registered C difficile as the underlying cause of death and the rest mentioned it as a contributory factor.
David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, yesterday held a "cleanliness summit", saying he would publish hospitals' individual MRSA infection rates.You think the USA's people see health care as an election issue? Just imagine being a British voter!
Labels: NHS Meltdown
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 6:21 PM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
And in the midst of this, female Muslim medical students in the UK are refusing to follow new rules (these should be new?) requiring that they roll up their arms and scrub to the elbows to try to prevent the spread of these superbugs.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2008/02/26/muslim-medics-in-alder-hey-stand-off-100252-20524780/
Right, because private heath care does such a fabulous job of preventing infections in America. Give me a break, at least 45,000,000 people in the UK aren't uninsured. The American health care system is the most inefficient and expensive in all of the industrialized world. And of course when I say "inefficient and expensive" I'm referring to the cost for the patient not that of a corporation.
This whole 70-odd% figure thing is a questionable story anyway, at best a distortion of the truth - LayScience has a good post on it.
I can't tell if "Columbian Leaf" is comparing apples and oranges--"Hey, antibiotic-resistant hospital-caused infections may be at disgraceful rates in the UK, but at least all those people aren't uninsured"--or if he is saying that there are as many clostridium d. infections in American hospitals as in UK hospitals.
I would think that latter statistic would be on public record somewhere, though I don't know it myself.
What's the betting the UK hospitals have more of a problem than U.S. hospitals with the named infections?
I need a "cleanliness summit" in my own house with my kids. Do you think I can get government financial support for that?
To second columbian_leaf I'll just say we're seeing a similar increase in c. diff here in the US. It is all over the place and very difficult to prevent. This is not a problem of the NHS, it is a public health problem worldwide.
New laws are getting passed including the healthy hospitals act of 2007 to address this exact same problem in the states.
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