How is Your Hospital doing these days ?

Have you ever wanted to compare hospitals and their care? Now you have a way. The comparisons are posted on a special web site.

The site was launched in 2004 as part of the federal Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has created its "Hospital Compare" Web site: www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

Click on these two links to read more about this process and compare your hospital.

Link 1


Link 2

What's Right in Health Care: 365 Stories of Purpose, Worthwhile Work, and Making a Difference.

A new book has been published dealing with 365 Healthcare stories that have made a difference. Go to this link to read more about this new book. The link is

http://thenewsherald.com/stories/012008/loc_20080120005.shtml

OSHA Offers a New Resource for Medical Facilities

In the fall of 2007 OSHA released a Web site that provides step-by-step guidance, along with the requirements and educational resources managers need to ensure occupational safety.Please click on the link below for this tool and more information.

http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/compliance_assistance/quickstarts/health_care/index_hc.html

Fingernails and Infection

Outpatient Surgery E-Weekly (2/5/08) has reported about a study that is published in the January issue of the Journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology that found that although antibiotic gels help increase hand hygiene, they failed to reduce infection rates in two ICUs over a two-year period.

"Hand hygiene may be important, but it's only one ingredient in the overall recipe for preventing infection," says Mark Rupp, MD, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, medical director of the school's Department of Healthcare Epideminology and the study's principal author.

Exactly why the infection rates did not decrease when hand hygiene compliance increased is unknown, says Dr. Rupp. One theory has to do with fingernail length. They found more, and varied, microbes when the nurses had fingernails more than two millimeters long, wore rings or lacked access to hand gels. According to Dr. Rupp, fingernails are too long for healthcare if you can see them over the skin of your fingers when looking at your palm.

To read more on this topic please go to the link below.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/524333