What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
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Every year, it is estimated that 1.7 million American patients contract infections while hospitalized.
Ronald B. Goodspeed, MD, MPH, President of Southcoast Hospitals Group and President of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors, offers this advice for patients and families to help prevent catching a potentially lethal germ while in the hospital.
- Family members and hospital staff should wash their hands coming in and out of the room.
- Patients' bodies should not be shaved before surgery. Straight-edge razors can cause small nicks that make portals for germs. Instead, use clippers, when needed.
- Antibiotics should be given within an hour before surgery to help prevent infections. But without an infection, there's generally no need to be on antibiotics a day after surgery.
- Shower the morning of surgery to help eliminate germs.
- If a central IV line must be put in, the skin around the site should cleaned with a special kind of soap called chlorhexidine.
- Some of the many tubes attached to surgery patients, such as urinary catheters, may not be needed, so it's important to ask whether they are. And if one type, known as a central line, is necessary, changing it frequently might not be a good idea, because that could introduce germs.
- Vulnerable patients should not be exposed to visitors with colds or other contagious illnesses.
- Health care workers should wear gloves when adjusting IV lines and performing other duties that could allow for the introduction of germs. It's also important that hands are washed before putting gloves on.
- Diabetic patients should make sure their blood sugar is especially well controlled before and after surgery because diabetics are known to be more prone to infections.
- It's important to stay warm with blankets before and after surgery. Research has shown that staying warm lessens the chance of developing a post-surgery infection.
- The mouths of ventilator patients need to be cleaned meticulously to help eliminate germs.
- For patients on ventilators, which help with breathing, make sure the head of the bed is elevated at a 30-degree angle, not flat.
Sources: U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the Insitute for Healthcare Improvement.
Information on this page was originally supplied to The Boston Globe for an article that was published on August 27, 2007
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