You think you go to the hospital to get well – but many patients end up with infections they catch in hospitals, mainly due to unclean conditions or unwashed hands.
A study reported in the JAMA Internal Medicine Journal tallied up a cost of $10 billion a year for all those hospital-acquired infections.
If hospitals were to fix all the conditions causing these infections, that’s a huge savings in health care spending, not to mention uncounted lives saved.
To come up with that $10 billion, researchers studied medical literature from 1986 through April 2013. They excluded hospitals outside of the United States.
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Here are the five infections researchers focused on and the percent of cost they represented:
1. Surgical site infections = 33.7 % of the total
2. Ventilator-associated pneumonia = 31.6% of the total
3. Central line-associated bloodstream infections = 18.9% of the total
4. Clostrium difficile infections =15.4% of the total
5. Catheter-associated urinary tract infections =
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