CDDEP 13 Mar 2012 Daniel Saman At a recent healthcare innovations summit, Atul Gawande used the United States’ robust data-driven agricultural industry as a model that healthcare should emulate and commented that we even know the number of cows in every county. It is hard to imagine how cows have anything to do with healthcare acquired infections. The former are gentle creatures that mankind has benefited from for ages, and the latter is an unrelenting plague causing significant death and disability in untold numbers. It is estimated that these infections affect one-in-twenty hospitalized patients, but besides estimates and projections there is little hard evidence, just scant data from handpicked references or reports in the literature. Read more
A tale of two cows: Why we have a cow map and not a healthcare acquired infection map
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Let’s see, maybe I can give some answers about why we have a cow herd map and we don’t have an HAI map
1. Patients with HAIs don’t moo loud enough to be counted.
2. Hospitals spend too much time spreading BS to spend any precious time counting
3. Money to feed the heads of the herd (CEOs, administration) can’t be spent on counting
4. Cows are bigger than germs
5. Doing studies on cows and germs can make a guy a lot of money
6. Herding cows is easier than herding germs
7. It’s easier to find a cow is than it is to find a germ, and it is easier to find a herd of cows than it is to find an HAI outbreak.
8. Cow shit stinks more than germs and is easier to detect
9. Cow patties are easier to find than piles of germs, and they are usable for fertilizer.
10. Germs multiply faster than cows, but you can’t see them.
11. Farmers make money on cows and Hospitals make money on germs(less incentive for reductions).
This is just a short list of my observations about counting cows vs counting HAIs.
Some of these comments may be lame excuses of hospitals to explain why there is no HAI map (but there is the cow map). All of my tongue in cheek comments came from a years worth of working on a MDRO HAI committee with almost all Hospital epidemiologists and Infection control nurses (APIC oriented).
Kathy, RN