Make sure hospital stay doesn’t leave you sicker

Going to the hospital isn’t supposed to make you sicker. But for an alarmingly high number of Americans, it does.

Medical errors occur during as many as one of every three hospital stays, and about 7 percent of those patients die or are permanently harmed as a result, according to a study published in the journal Health Affairs.

Health-care facilities bear the bulk of the responsibility for preventing hospital-acquired infections, medication mix-ups and other errors by adhering to evidence-based best practices.

The federal government has stepped up its efforts to prevent errors by refusing to reimburse hospitals for the extra costs associated with certain hospital-acquired conditions and by making public individual hospitals’ rates of these conditions. In addition, the Obama administration announced this month it is working with hospitals and private insurers on a new initiative that aims to cut preventable medical errors by 40 percent over the next three years.

There are also things patients can do to reduce their risk of being the victim a medical error. Here are a few tips from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as well as local and national patient safety groups:

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LA County hospitals keeping eye on 'superbug'

Health officials urged people not to panic over a drug-resistant germ present elsewhere in the country that has emerged in Los Angeles County hospitals and nursing homes.

About 350 infections of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, were reported over a seven-month period last year, according to a study by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Fifty-three percent of the infections came from acute care hospitals, 41 percent from long-term acute care hospitals and 6 percent from nursing homes.

The bacterium tends to strike elderly patients who often stay in facilities for an extended period of time. Infections also occur among sick patients on ventilators or who take long courses of antibiotics. Healthy people usually are not affected, according to health experts.

Since researchers did not look at how patients fared after getting infected, they did not know how many cases were fatal. They also could not tell whether patients transported the germ from a nursing home to a hospital or got infected while in the hospital.

CRKP is the latest antibiotic-resistant germ that hospitals across the United States are grappling with. Up until last year, hospitals and laboratories in the Los Angeles area never had to report cases of CRKP, which first appeared on the East Coast. Unlike other superbugs, CRKP so far has been confined to health care settings and has not spread into the community.

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