Infections in the large-bore tubes that keep patients in intensive care units alive are often lethal but readily preventable. A simple checklist of sanitary practices was proven to cut the rate of these “central line infections” to nearly zero. But that was in one chain of hospitals in Michigan. What about the rest of the country?
Peter Pronovost, the Johns Hopkins safety guru who ran the study in Michigan proving that these infections could be eliminated, was given big grant money by the U.S. government and private foundations to spread the learning to the other 49 states. So what has he found? Here’s an excerpt from what he wrote recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association:
Hospital enrollment in the program has been surprisingly slow. In many states, less than 20% of hospitals have volunteered to participate. Some hospitals have reduced infection rates, most have not. Some hospitals claim they use the checklist, despite having high or unknown infection rates. Some hospitals are content to meet the national average, despite evidence that these rates may be reduced by half. Some hospital administrators say their patients are too sick; these infections are inevitable. Yet, intensive care units in several large academic hospitals have nearly eliminated CLABSIs [central line infections]. Some hospitals blame competing priorities for their inattention to these infections. If these lethal, expensive, measurable, and largely preventable infections are not a priority, what is?
Perhaps most concerning is the response from nurses in participating hospitals when asked: “if a new nurse in your hospital saw a senior physician placing a catheter but not complying with the checklist, would the nurse speak up and would the physician comply?” The answer is almost always, “there is no way the nurse would speak up.” Doubly disturbing, physicians and nurses uniformly agree patients should receive the checklist items. What other industry would
accept a routine safety violation that is associated with the deaths of tens of thousands of patients and not be held accountable? The US health care culture still does not support the questioning of physician behavior.
That last sentence is perhaps the most chilling — because it shows, once again, that many patients are going to be doomed to preventable injuries and death until the medical culture begins to change, and doctors get off their pedestal and join the rest of the team trying to keep patients safe.