Patients should be told infection rates

Since simply spending time in hospital can raise the risk of infection, doctors are recommending that patients are only admitted a short time before their surgery is scheduled.

Informed choice by patients would be a powerful force leading to higher standards in UAE hospitals

One of the paradoxes of modern medicine is that those who are admitted to hospital sometimes become sicker, through exposure to disease-resistant bacteria, than they had been from the ailment that led to their admission in the first place. As The National reported yesterday, the UAE is not immune to this global trend.

As Dr Nellie Boma, chief medical officer at Al Rahba Hospital in Abu Dhabi, explained, the risks cannot be eliminated but can be mitigated through a series of relatively straightforward actions. Using the example of new mothers who undergo Caesarean sections – the most common way for women to develop surgical site infections – she said that simple practices include medical staff washing their hands thoroughly and patients preparing themselves by washing before admission.

However, since simply spending time in hospital can raise the risk of infection, doctors are recommending that ­patients are only admitted a short time before their surgery is scheduled.

This leads to an important point. By the very nature of the many different hospitals in the UAE, the rate of infections suffered by their patients will vary due to factors ranging from the conscientiousness of their management through to the age and design of their buildings.

For this reason, it would be useful if patients were able to find out each hospital’s infection rate so they can make an informed choice about the risk to which they are exposing themselves. Such disclosure would serve as pressure to make underperforming hospitals lift their game, and raise standards overall.

Battling infection in hospitals is similar to trying to keep the road toll down – the risk can only be mitigated rather than eliminated ­entirely, so there is always more that can be done to lower the failure rate. Even the best-performing hospitals cannot afford to be com­placent.

Informed choice by consumers would be a powerful force leading to improvements from which everyone stands to benefit.