Surgery Centers Lax on Infection Control

Hospital-acquired infections have become a huge problem in America. Experts estimate that at least 100,000 people die because of something they caught while hospitalized. Now a new report suggests that same-day surgery centers may also pose a substantial risk when it comes to infection control. Increasingly, patients are turning to outpatient surgical centers for things like colonoscopies, cataract surgery, knee surgery and pacemaker placement. According to the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, three quarters of the operations that take place each year are done in outpatient settings. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that two-thirds of the centers audited had “lapses in infection control identified during the inspections.” In many instances patients could have been exposed to blood-borne pathogens. In some cases patients actually came down with hepatitis C as a result of lax infection control procedures.
[Journal of the American Medical Association, June 9, 2010]