Infection Management - Random Thoughts

You go to a hospital with one dieases/symptom, there are others that are there for other diesases and symptoms. So the result? Well you end up catching the other guys diesase at the same time exposing your disease to someone else...

Now that we have squared away why we need Infection Management - let us talk about what is being done to control it. Well - simple answer not too much in majority of the hospitals.

Well for starters check the following link

http://www.infectionacademy.org/default.asp

Following are key challenges in Infection Management today

1. Lack of proper standards that hospitals can follow irrespective of the size
2. Lack of strong focus on this aspect of spread of diseases
3. The money bag of Health Care - Payors yet to take enough notice of this problem and have some expensive consultants provide them with eye gogging numbers
4. Patient demanding to undestand what this means to him when he walks in for a treatment.

I feel this area has a lot of scope to build standards that are effective and implementable at a broad level of IDNs and small hospitals. Like they say you cannot improve what you cannot measure..