I have always thought one of the problems with medical research is that it is mostly done by people that couldn’t get into medical school, apparentely even people who do get into med school are pretty incompetent.
Why aren’t hospitals leaping to adopt these best practices?…. More than half of the 2,075 respondents, most of whom were infection control nurses employed by hospitals, reported that they use a cumbersome paper-based system for tracking patients’ conditions that makes it harder to spot infections in real time. Seven in 10 said they are not given enough time to train other hospital workers on proper procedures. Nearly a third said enforcing best practice guidelines was their greatest challenge, and one in five said administrators were not willing to spend the necessary money to prevent CRBSIs.
[Peter] Pronovost said part of the problem was that many hospital chief executives aren’t even aware of their institution’s bloodstream infection rates, let alone how easily they could bring them down. When hospital leaders decide to create a culture in which preventing infections is a priority, he added, nurses feel empowered to remind physicians to follow the checklist when inserting catheters, physicians are provided antiseptic soaps as part of their catheter kits and infection control personnel have the best tools to monitor patients.
I wonder if this isn’t also a problem of a for profit health-care system where a patient with an infection is going to spend a lot more money, so from the hospitals perspective an infection is a good thing.