Bloodless Coup

"Greatest health care in the world"

With infection rates that are decidedly less than great. And apparently, we are too poor to take measures to keep up with the rest of the developed world:

While the role of clothing in the spread of infection hasn't been well studied, some hospitals in Denmark and Europe have adopted wide-ranging infection-control practices that include provisions for the clothing that health care workers wear both in and out of the hospital. Workers of both sexes must change into hospital-provided scrubs when they arrive at work and even wear sanitized plastic shoes, also provided by the hospital. At the end of the day, they change back into their street clothes to go home.

The focus on hand washing, sterilization, screening and clothing control appears to have worked: in Denmark, fewer than 1 percent of staph infections involve resistant strains of the bacteria, while in the United States, the numbers have surged to 50 percent in some hospitals.

But American hospitals operate on tight budgets and can't afford to provide clothes and shoes to every worker. In addition, many hospitals don't have the extra space for laundry facilities.

It still galls me that during a hospitalization my mom had, that the hospital told her that really she should hire her own nurse to take care of her during her stay in the hospital, since they didn't have enough to go around.