Changes in basic procedures – as simple as washing hands or giving aspirin to heart-attack patients – are enabling Colorado hospitals to cut infections and life-threatening emergencies.
At Exempla St. Joseph’s Hospital, for example, the number of heart-attack emergencies outside the intensive care unit decreased 40 percent to 2.37 per thousand in the past three years.
At Centura Health’s Littleton Adventist Hospital, the number of ventilator-linked cases of pneumonia has dropped to zero for this year from nine in 2005.
The results are part of a nationwide campaign to cut risks by ensuring hospitals use the best practices in handling equipment and patients.
The “100,000 Lives Campaign” involved more than 3,000 hospitals nationwide, including 62 in Colorado.
“I can’t think of another instance when so many hospitals have set a national goal, and achieved it,” said Dr. Stephen Schoenbaum, an executive vice president at the The Commonwealth Fund, based in Washington, D.C.
The campaign, sponsored by Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Health Care Improvement, began after a 1999 study found that simple hospital errors could lead to as many as 98,000 deaths a year.
The effort focused on goals that were considered easy to correct, such as preventing surgical-site infections by properly delivering antibiotics and creating emergency-response teams to rapidly intervene when a patient’s condition deteriorates.
At St. Joseph’s, rapid-response teams reduced heart attacks for patients in the general wards, according to Maria Kinsella, a nursing educator at the hospital.
“We actually saw an immediate decrease,” she said. “The nurses on the floor really wanted this.”
At Centura Health, the largest hospital system in Colorado, mortality rates have dropped 9.2 percent since instituting rapid-response teams, said Beryl Vallejo, vice president of patient safety.
The Medical Center of Aurora’s ventilator-linked pneumonia cases, which reach as many as nine in a three-month period, have been reduced to zero, said Carol Gregory, chief nursing officer.
The center did that by adopting new practices – such as keeping a patient’s head elevated, guarding against bacteria with improved oral hygiene and keeping tubes from getting dislodged.
The Colorado Trust, a Denver-based nonprofit foundation, has given $4 million in grants to the effort. Of that, $35,000 was given to each participating hospital.
Staff writer Joel Grostephan can be reached at jgrostephan@denverpost.com.
Para leer este artículo en español, vaya a denverpost.com/aldia
