(CNN)Preparing to have surgery, many people wonder whether they are helpless to prevent a potentially deadly hospital-associated infection. A new report published Thursday by the World Health Organization, "The Global Guidelines for the Prevention of Surgical Site Infection," addresses these concerns.
Though the report targets surgical teams as its audience, patients might also benefit from reading these guidelines, written by a panel of 20 leading experts. Collected from dozens of scientific studies, the recommendations include 13 guidelines for preventing infections before surgery and 16 for during and after surgery.
In this "age of transparency and patient safety," Greene said it is important for us to ask questions of our health care providers and to consider going to another provider or facility if you feel uncomfortable with the answers. "Quite honestly, consumers are being much more proactive. I've been doing this infection prevention for, probably, 30 years, and in the last five years, I've had more inquiries, because consumers want to know," Greene said. Another suggestion: Patients can search online for hospital-acquired infection data. "Hospital Compare" on the Medicare website contains information about hospitals. Many states, usually through their departments of health, track health care-associated infection data as well. (Here are New York State rates, and here are Kansas rates.) "You can go and look and see what the patterns and trends are in certain hospitals," Greene said, adding that you can then ask your surgeon about these rates.
Millions of surgeries, millions of infections "Every year, over 240 million surgical procedures are performed globally," Kelley said. Although no global registry exists to track surgical site infections, health authorities estimate that each year, millions of patients around the world acquire infections during
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surgery. In the United States, an estimated 722,000 health care-associated infections occurred in acute care hospitals during 2011, and about 75,000 patients died from such infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One to three of every 100 patients will develop a surgical site infection, the CDC estimates.
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