A Consumer Reports review of 19 Colorado hospitals found their ability to protect patients from infections varied depending on the type of infection.
The magazine used information reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between October 2013 and September 2014 to rate hospitals’ avoidance of five types of infections: MRSA, C. difficile, central line, urinary tract and surgical site.
“Every year in the U.S., 648,000 people develop infections during a hospital stay, and 75,000 people die,” according to the report.
Denver Health Medical Center, one of the state’s busiest hospitals, with more than 25,000 admissions annually, did well in avoiding infections overall, with a middle rating on a five-point scale.
But the hospital received the second-lowest rating in avoiding catheter-urinary tract infections and scored the lowest rating for avoiding surgical site infections.
The hospital uses internal tracking and information like that in the report to improve safety procedures, said Heather Young, Denver Health epidemiologist.
Since the data used in the report was collected, Young said, the hospital has reduced the numbers of catheter urinary tract and surgical site infections.
Lutheran Medical Center received the magazine’s second-highest rating for avoiding methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a strain of staph infection that can be difficult to treat and deadly because it is resistant to some commonly used antibiotics.
Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital and Medical Center of Aurora also received the second-highest rating for MRSA. But those two hospitals received Consumer Reports’ second-lowest rating for avoiding C.difficile, commonly called “C. diff,” infections.
That infection is caused by bacteria normally found in the gastrointestinal tracts of about 5 percent of the general population, according to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, or RID.
Normally, other bacteria keep C. diff from getting out of control. But C. diff can take over when a patient is put on antibiotics, causing severe diarrhea and inflammation of the colon, according to RID.
Platte Valley Medical Center, in Brighton, had the worst rating in the Consumer Reports analysis for avoiding overall infections.
Platte Valley spokeswoman Charmaine Weis said the size of the hospital, which has only 98 licensed beds, many of them only sporadically occupied, results in a low rating.
“If we have just one case it makes our numbers look really bad. We just don’t have the volume. We may have only 28 patients staying here at one time. It is easy to make us a target,” she said.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or
