Readings in Health Care: U.S. Doctor Presses Need to Catch Up to 19th Century Medicine October 17, 2009
Posted by Charles Bosdet in Comparisons, Health care, Health care results, United States.Tags: Checklists, cleanliness, Gawande, Health care, healthcare, Hospitals, ICU, Infections, intensive care, Intensive Care Units (ICUs), Johns Hopkins Hospital, New Yorker, Peter Pronovost, Sinai-Grace Hospital, United States
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“The Checklist; If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?,” by Atul Gawande. The New Yorker, December 10, 2007.
Would 21st-century American medical professionals risk patients’ lives by ignoring hospital procedures that were well established in the 19th century?
Yes.
In this article, a doctor crisscrosses the United States, lobbying physicians to adopt a checklist of basic cleanliness routines at hospitals. Amazingly, he meets resistance even though he can prove that hospitals using the list quickly reduced patient infections by two thirds.
You might think this isn’t an issue 140-odd years after Louis Pasteur’s and Joseph Lister’s pioneering work in bacteria and sterilization, and Florence Nightingale’s application of cleanliness standards in U.S. patient care.
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