By Mary Wade Burnside
FAIRMONT — Decades ago, many hospitals consisted of wards in which four, six, eight or even 10 patients shared a large space.
The set-up worked well for doctors and nurses, but did not necessarily provide a comfortable stay for the patient.
And while comfort is a consideration behind the move to all-private hospital rooms, many health-care officials point out that the patients in those wards were not always as ill as they are today, when insurance generally dictates that most patients actually admitted for a hospital stay be pretty sick.
Plus, with infections on the rise, private rooms can serve as one element to bringing those numbers down.
“I would say that private rooms are infection-prevention nirvana,” said Kathy Warye, CEO of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. “It would be a most welcome development for our members.”
Hospital-acquired, or nosocomial, infections can include afflictions such as pneumonia, staph infections, and other infections patients get from catheters or central lines. Nosocomial infections affect about 2 million patients a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov).
Also, the CDC noted, the proportion of potentially-deadly Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, has been growing among the percentage of all staph infections. In 1974, MRSA represented 2 percent of all staph infections; that number rose to 22 percent in 1995 and 63 percent in 2004.
At United Hospital Center in Clarksburg, which will move in two years to a new, all-private room facility off exit 124 of Interstate 79, the proportion of patients who are cultured and found to have MRSA versus all staph infections has remained somewhat lower than the national average, at 55 percent, said Mark Povroznik, UHC’s director of quality initiatives and chairman of infection control.
“It’s been climbing across the nation over the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s been slowly increasing but it’s about leveled out nationally at 60 percent. Nursing homes, however, where you have more risk factors, the range is about 70 percent.”
UHC also recently was recognized by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement for reducing to zero the rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia, another potential hospital-acquired infection.
Data has shown that private hospital rooms can help reduce the incidence of hospital-acquired infection.
“But at the same time,” Warye said, private rooms “are not the silver bullet. If health care workers are still not applying a host of infection control measures, you’re still going to see infection transmission.”
For instance, health-care workers that do not wash their hands when they leave one patient’s room and go to another still can spread disease, Warye said.
“They still have to comply 100 percent all the time with all known infection controls or you won’t see a drop in transmission.”
E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.
