According to Consumer Reports, the answer is a definite “yes.” Consumer Reports’ new Ratings of more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals show which do a good job of avoiding MRSA, C.diff, and other deadly infections. Every year an estimated 648,000 people in the U.S. develop infections during a hospital stay, and about 75,000 die with them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – more than twice the number of people who die each year in car crashes.
Many of those illnesses and deaths can be traced back to the use of antibiotics, the very drugs that are supposed to fight the infections. For the first time ever, the Ratings include information on MRSA and C. diff infections, based on data that hospitals submit to the CDC. Three out of 10 hospitals in the Ratings earned one of two lowest scores for keeping C. diff in check; four out of 10 got low marks for avoiding MRSA. Only 6 percent of hospitals scored well against both infections. For the complete article see, How Your Hospital Can make You Sick.
In Colorado, Platte Valley Medical Center is the only hospital to receive the lowest rating for preventing infections, though infections are just one measure of a hospital’s safety record. Many of the larger hospital facilities located in the Denver metro have yet to be rated by Consumer Reports for infection safety.
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