New Hampshire Health and Human Services officials say they need more time to get hospital acquired infection rates from all 26 hospitals in the state.
A two year old state law required the information be made public this summer.
State health officials promise they’ll have data to publish by early 2009.
But critics say they can’t understand why it is taking so long for hospitals to report infections.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s David Darman has more.
The Commissioner of Health and Human Services told members of the Health, Human Services and Elder Affairs committee that some progress had been made on reporting infections.
Here’s Commissioner Nicholas Toumpas on one of those successes.
On central bloodline, we’re using the CDC’s definition and we have data right now from 3 hospitals, concord, Dartmouth,and I believe its Cottage hospital.
These three hospitals had taken part in a pilot program to identify these infections.
But the law asked all 26 hospitals in the state to report on six particular types of infections.
Health and Human Services officials say most hospitals lacked sufficient staff or proper training for staff to report the requested data.
Director of Public Health Dr. Jose Montero says there was also another problem with one of the categories the law asked them to report.
At the national level even at the federal level the value of ventilator associated pneumonia as an indicator of hospital acquired infections is under discussion. There has been a great difficulty in establishing a standardized definition and getting every hospital nationwide to report that way. Things are really bad with this indicator.
Health and Human Service officials say another problem lies with the amount of data a hospital produces.
Small hospitals clearly perform fewer operations, and thus less data than big ones.
Dr. Montero says this presents a problem when using percentages to determine rates.
How do you compare a hospital that has 4 and 100 percent success? If they miss one we’re going to say ‘they only had 75 percent success’ versus the one that had 300 procedures and missed one. Its not going to effect that that rates. And that is one of the biggest limitations of the data.
The former House member who shepherded this bill through the legislature and into law said he almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Former Representative Leo Pepino of Manchester lost his wife Rita to bone cancer a few years ago.
He says she also battled numerous infections that she picked up in the hospital.
Pepino says he thought he’d done a good thing when he got the bill passed and signed into law.
Now your doctors and whatever they are, are coming in here looking for changes for this and changes for that. we had all them sessions. At that time, Health and Human Services held all kinds of hearings. These doctors weren’t here looking for changes. All they wanted to do was oppose it. And that’s the problem I had.
Pepino’s bill also had funds attached to help the state get hospitals to share their infection data.
But that funding was later stripped away by the state senate.
Now Health and Human Services officials are promising to have the data the law asks for by the spring of 2009.
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Hospital-acquired contagions account for about one half of all hospital complications. Therefore, we are dealing with a problem on a massive scale.
There are two basic pieces to learning the cause and control of this dilemma: (1) It is the nature of the beast - infected people go to hospitals because that is where they need to be. (2) Human behavior plays the largest role in the spread of infectious organisms.
There are identifiable standards of care to prevent the spread of communicable diseases in hospitals and to prevent infections of various parts of the body arising from sloppy technique. This is an area of provable negligence that often goes unnoticed.