Blogger says: Bacterial Infections = Not so Sexy.

Kia Franklin

Blogger says: Bacterial Infections = Not so Sexy.

And I totally agree. As I do with the rest of Mike the Mad Biologist’s analysis in his recent blog post entitled The Silent Killer: Hospital-Acquired Infections (Thanks also to Majikthise for cross-posting this. That’s how I came across it):

Bacterial infections aren’t sexy: no one walks, bikes, hops, pogo sticks for the cure. There are no ribbons, no bumper stickers, and no hot celebrities (damn!). Yet, according to the CDC, bacterial infections acquired in hospitals kill at least 90,000 people per year in the U.S. Granted some of those who died would have died from something else anyway, but that’s still a really large number. To put this figure in context, in 2004, roughly 18,000 people died from HIV. 40,000 died from breast cancer. Go Here to Finish Reading

He also cites to studies that indicate the number of hospital-acquired infections is only likely to rise in the future as we become more immune to antibiotics. This is, simply put, very very bad:

Friends have often asked me why I don’t take bioterrorism very seriously. I have a lot of reasons, but here’s the germane one: the bioterrorist attack, for all intensive purposes, is already here. 90,000 dead per year—forget the World Trade Center, that’s a Nagasaki sized number.

Okay, so why is the Mad Biologist’s blog being mentioned on TortDeform? Consider this a “FLAG THIS” blog. Lots of TD contributors have talked about medical malpractice and med mal reform. Often times, proponents of patients’ rights to civil justice have been placed on the defensive to this issue, made to explain why harmed patients should be able to access the courts and get answers about why/how they were injured and whether it was due to negligence.

But look at these numbers—the dialogue should no longer be about whether patients have real injuries or whether lawyers are trying to pull a valid claim out of thin air. If there were no preventable medical injuries, there would be no need for medical malpractice lawsuits. But there are—a lot. And now, let’s move the dialogue further.

Clearly some mistakes are being made and certainly they are of grave enough nature to rise to the level of medical malpractice. Are all of these families whose loved ones died unecessarily, taking their grievances to court? No. Are most of them? Again, no. A small, small fraction of medical malpractice victims end up in court (fewer than 2%). For those that do, great, this is the injured person’s constitutional right.

Placing caps on their remedies once they get to court is wrong and only further punishes injured patients. We need to focus on preventing the preventable injuries. We need to continue to hold the wrongdoers accountable (a large portion of which are repeat-offenders, with 5.9 percent of doctors responsible for 57.8 percent of malpractice payments from 1991 to 2005). And we need to focus on reducing unnecessary deaths.

So, all that to say, “flag this.” These figures are important information to know.

Posted at 4:19 PM, Sep 07, 2007 in Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Comments

This blog entry argues, there is an obverse side to failure in torts. Torts fail from both directions.

Most claims are weak.

Most strong claims are not brought.

Utter failure. No deterrence, no compensation, no improvement in the service, no validity to the claims. Nothing.

The lawyer has zero competence to regulate the medical profession. Get rid of the lawyer entirely. Every one of those nosocomial infection deaths was foreseeably the fault of a lawyer, an utter failure at regulation.

If something fails for decades on end, should we change methods? How long will it take, how many millions of deaths will it take until the lawyer if fired from its regulatory job?

I am not quite sure with what you are trying to say with your article. Are you saying that hospital acquired infections are malpractice? My understanding is that most are due to the fact that we have patients who are very sick who either aspirate or develope infections due to the fact that they are intubated with catheters that break the skin. The best way to keep a patient from getting an infection is to not have them in the hospital, not intubate them, operate on them or touch them.

I tell you what, if you dont want tort deform, why can't the same tort principles be applied to the legal profession. That way when a case does not go well for an attorney, his client should be able to find some "expert" who states that the attorney did not prep the witnesses or call the right ones, or did not properly instruct his or her client. All the attorneys documents can then be reviewed to be sure that they include verbatim every discussion. Then, all billing and charges should be accounted for to ensure that fraud does not take place. This is the plight of those in medicine, so if you think this will help medicine, it will sure help the legal profession.

As you are probably aware, these types of legal malpractice cases are increasing rapidly and are becoming very successful. I suggest you check out the New York Legal Malpractice Blog for a review of several recent cases. We will see if "whats good for the goose, is good for the gander".

Excellent post!

As someone who lost a family member to a hospital-acquired infection, this issue hits close to home. One of the reasons that so few med mal cases are brought is the difficulty in finding a med mal lawyer to take your case. Contrary to the popular myth, you cannot find a lawyer to take just any med mal claim. Med mal lawyers, understandably, only want to take cases with merit, and a likelihood of success. Thus, for any case in which there is no "smoking gun," finding a med mal lawyer to take it is nearly impossible. The absence of a smoking gun does not mean that there was not error -- and error that killed a patient. So many meritorious cases never even become cases, and many grieving families are left without a remedy.

Make no mistake, hospital acquired infections will not be stopped by litigation. But accountability -- in the form of liability -- is an essential ingredient of solving the problem. Until hospitals are held to account -- financially -- for not having in place best practices for infection control, the incentives for them to adopt such practices will be inadequate.

Posted by: Lost a Family Member to Hospital Acquired Infection | September 10, 2007 10:05 AM

I am so sorry to hear that anyone has suffered a loss but in cases like this it is important to understand what is going on. First, there is the assumption that hospital acquired infections are mal practice. How are they malpractice? Lets look at a typical hospital acquired infection. A patient has severe hypotension from a heart attack and needs to be intubated to help them breathe. It is a known fact that with each day of intubation there is an increasing incidence of pneumonia. During this time, their lungs fill with fluid because of the heart problem and on the 6th day they get pneumonia. This is a hospital acquired infection. Why did it occur, because the patient had a heart attack and had to be intubated. When you look at all hospital acquired infections, the vast majortiy are pneumonias due to intubation or patients inability to control their secretion.

If we look at the economics, why is it so hard to find a lawyer to sue for a hospital acquired infection? Because no malpractice occured.

Kia's article is good at eliciting emotions but fails to look at what really causes these infections. Can they be decreased, sure but I would rather intubate a patient than have them drown in their own fluids. Nevertheless, the immature reaction to all crisis is to blame others than to go through the remaining stages of grieving.

Throckmorton,

I do not know what percentage, if any, of nosocomial infections are malpractice, but it is undisputed that the vast majority of such infections could be prevented if hospital employees practiced better hygiene.

Recent observations by the JC and other stakeholders reported that hospital personnel washed their hands less than 50% of the time they had the opportunity to do so.

Other kinds of infections, particularly UTIs, are related to if not entirely caused by hygience practices vis-a-vis catheterization.

Your question -- what percentage of nosocomial infections are malpractice -- is both germane and important. Nevertheless, I suggest it would be an overstatement to assert that such infections are only rarely the results of negligence.