Stung by criticism, JCAHO targets infections

Nursing, Apr 2003

REPORTING ERRORS

Prodded by an investigative report published in the Chicago Tribune last year, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has announced an initiative to track and reduce nosocomial infections in American health care facilities.

The JCAHO officials say hospitals aren't reporting many deaths that are or could be due to infections acquired in the hospital. After checking the JCAHO's 7-yearold database of such events, they discovered only 10 such reports involving 53 patients. However, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, about 2 million people contract nosocomial infections in hospitals each year, and about 90,000 of these people die.

The JCAHO officials believe health care organizations don't think of nosocomial infections as errors and therefore don't report and track them properly. The commission has convened a panel of health care professionals who plan to make recommendations this summer for reducing nosocomial infection.