Re: feeding tube misplacement
Michael Chambers (mchamber@postoffice.ptd.net)
Sun, 17 Mar 1996 23:19:15 -0800
DDerleth@aol.com wrote:
>
> Your question about "acceptable" rates of infection is a hard one to answer
> in many ways.
>
> Perhaps the hardest type of infection to entirely eliminate would be those of
> long term IVs, which are often due to staph and yeast. There are data in the
> medical literature about typical infection rates, but I don't know that
> typical equals acceptable.
>
> People in NICUs who aren't careful about colds (like RSV and parainfluenza)
> are one of my pet peeves. Anyone with a cold in a NICU must wear a mask and
> be very careful with their hands and wash them often.
>
> Pseudomonas is often an infection that gets in through the breathing tube,
> since that bug likes moist places. The best defense against that, in my
> opinion, is to get the tube out early on, but most NICUs don't get tubes out
> as early as we do. We see very few Pseudomonas infections in our NICU,
> perhaps because of early tube removal.
>
> Some infections are going to happen no matter how careful we are, but there
> are many that are avoidable, and we should do all we can to minimize
> infections. We use a special blood sampling apparatus in our NICU of our own
> design in the hoipe that it will minimize line infections. Our NICU is too
> small to run a good study to see if it really can do that, but I've been
> "advertising" the apparatus to other NICUs, and there has been some interest
> in testing it.
>
> I don't know that this answers your question, but I don't think there really
> is a good answer.
>
> Doug
(as I climb apon my soapbox) Doug don't take this as a personal attack but,
Who is responsable, as you wrote there are published typical infection rates,these
numbers represent people, some who will die from these hospital borne infections, some
will survive but have to bear the add costs for treatment?
How do the infection rate here compare with other countries?
Are these numbers consistent across the country?
Is cost a factor, it has been suggested that additional safeguards would add to hospital
overhead making them less profitable?
Why is there "no good answer", not to sound simplistic but isn't this problem something
within the realm of modern medicine?
( I shall climb down for now) thanks for responding.
Mike
P.S. to all who have waded through my typos and mispellings as soon as I work out some
bugs I will switch to my word processer appl. for these postings, so thanks for the
patience, as you my have noticed I think faster than I type ( I guess I stuck my foot in
my mouth with that one :) )