On Apr 23, 7:36 am, ironjustice <teamtan...@hotmail.com> wrote:Doctors
self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas
when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry
9 percent  <<

Public beatings .. ?

They’d try to “catch” a doctor who was washing up, giving him a $10
Starbucks card as reward. You might think that the highest earners in
a hospital wouldn’t much care about a $10 incentive — “but none of
them turned down the card,” Silka says. When the nurse spies reported
back the latest data, it was clear that the hospital’s efforts were
working — but not nearly enough. Compliance had risen to about 80
percent from 65 percent, but the Joint Commission required 90 percent
compliance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These results were delivered to the hospital’s leadership by Rekha
Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, during a meeting of the Chief
of Staff Advisory Committee. The committee’s roughly 20 members,
mostly top doctors, were openly discouraged by Murthy’s report. Then,
after they finished their lunch, Murthy handed each of them an agar
plate — a sterile petri dish loaded with a spongy layer of agar. “I
would love to culture your hand,” she told them. They pressed their
palms into the plates, and Murthy sent them to the lab to be cultured
and photographed. The resulting images, Silka says, “were disgusting
and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.” The administration
then decided to harness the power of such a disgusting image. One
photograph was made into a screen saver that haunted every computer in
Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not
complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid
evidence. “With people who have been in practice 25 or 30 or 40 years,
it’s hard to change their behavior,” Leon Bender says. “But when you
present them with good data, they change their behavior very rapidly.”
Some forms of data, of course, are more compelling than others, and in
this case an image was worth 1,000 statistical tables. Hand-hygiene
compliance shot up to nearly 100 percent and, according to the
hospital, it has pretty much remained there ever since. Cedars-Sinai’s
clever application of incentives is certainly encouraging to anyone
who opposes the wanton proliferation of bacterial infections. But it
also highlights how much effort can be required to solve a simple
problem — and, in this case, the problem is but one of many. Craig
Feied, a physician and technologist in Washington who is designing a
federally financed “hospital of the future,” says that hand hygiene,
while important, will never be sufficient to stop the spread of
bacteria. That’s why he is working with a technology company that
infuses hospital equipment with silver ion particles, which serve as
an antimicrobial shield. Microbes can thrive on just about any surface
in a hospital room, Feied notes, citing an old National Institutes of
Health campaign to promote hand-washing in pediatric wards. The
campaign used a stuffed teddy bear, called T. Bear, as a promotional
giveaway. Kids and doctors alike apparently loved T. Bear — but they
weren’t the only ones. When, after a week, a few dozen T. Bears were
pulled from the wards to be cultured, every one of them was found to
have acquired a host of new friends: Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli,
Pseudomonas, Klebsiella.. . .

Who loves ya.
Tom

Jesus Was A Vegetarian!
http://tinyurl.com/2r2nkh

Man Is A Herbivore!
http://tinyurl.com/a3cc3

DEAD PEOPLE WALKING
http://tinyurl.com/zk9fk

  Hepatitis just means inflammation of the liver.  *Infectious*
hepatitis refers to transmissible diseases, of course.