APIC questions Patient Safety Act disclosures
IC programs are specific, not easily comparable
Proposed federal legislation requiring hospitals to divulge both nursing staff levels and nosocomial infection rates would not provide patients with valid data for comparison between facilities, according to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology in Washington, DC.
"Depending on the site of infection, nursing care may or may not influence the development of hospital-acquired infection," APIC stated in a written release on the proposed Patient Safety Act. "Looking at the care giver’s role alone is not an easy task, due to a number of other influential factors that a patient encounters during his or her hospital stay."
Because a hospital’s infection control program should be based upon the hospital’s unique patient population, the program may not be comparable to those at other health care facilities, APIC argued. The proposed Patient Safety Act "would not provide health care consumers with the kind of valid quality information that would be useful in guiding their choice of providers," APIC stated.
In general, infection rates cannot easily be compared from hospital to hospital. An individual facility’s site-specific infection rate is subject to a wide variety of factors, including the type of patients being served; the patients’ underlying medical conditions, such as diabetes or cancer; and the complexity of treatments and invasive procedures performed, APIC noted.
"For example, the average patient undergoing a hernia repair at one hospital could be a 28-year-old healthy athletic male," APIC stated. "In another facility in the same city, the patient could be a 45-year-old obese diabetic male. The expected outcomes in these patients would differ and would have nothing to do with the care provided."
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