Researchers believe 48,000 deaths could have been prevented and $8.1 billion could have been saved in the United States, if patients hadn’t gotten infections after being admitted to a hospital.
Previous research has shown an association between deaths and hospital infections, but according to a new study, it’s difficult to figure out whether the patient actually got the infection in the hospital.
In the study, published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the authors set out to find out how many patients died because they got infected in the hospital.
“Just the way we know that there are 15,000 people who die every year in this country because of HIV, we should know how many people die because of infections they got in the hospital,” says Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior fellow at the social sciences think tank Resources for the Future. He and his colleagues wanted to find out how many people became sickened by pneumonia or sepsis (a life-threatening infection that has spread throughout the body) while they were hospitalized.
They looked at 69 million hospital discharge records from 40 states between 1998 and 2006. In an effort to rule out patients that already had infections or were so sick they would not have survived even without a hospital-acquired infection, researchers considered only patients who went in for elective surgery, not because of an emergency.
“These were people that the surgeon would not have operated on if they showed any signs of infection and not being well,” Laxminarayan explains.
He says that judging by the number of patients who then got an infection as opposed to those who didn’t, there were an estimated 290,000 cases of hospital-acquired sepsis and 200,000 cases of hospital-acquired pneumonia in 2006. Further, he said, “48,000 sepsis and pneumonia deaths can be attributed to hospital-acquired infections every year.”
In addition to the loss of life, these infections add to health care costs. The researchers estimate that the extra hospital days lead to $8.1 billion in added costs.
Laxminarayan says there are multiple reasons for patients getting an infection.
“You could have a surgery and the wound is not dressed properly or the operating room is not scrubbed properly or nurse didn’t wash her hands.”
Laxminarayan says some hospitals are starting to standardize procedure to reduce the spread of unnecessary infections.