Is Hospital Negligence the Reason for Most Hospital Re-Admissions?

A recent study has found that hospital negligence is to blame for most patient re-admissions. Researchers from the American College of Surgeons and Northwestern University discovered that more patients return to the hospital because of infections acquired during their stay than any other reason.

The study was published on February 3, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), reviewing nearly 500,000 operations performed in the U.S. over a one-year period in 2012, at 346 hospitals. The research team found that 20 percent of all unplanned re-admissions to the hospital within one month of the surgery were the result of surgical site infections.

Researchers uncover hospital negligence

When reviewing all surgical procedures, the research team focused on six types of operations — bariatric surgery, colectomy or protectomy, total hip or knee arthroplasty, hysterectomy, lower extremity vascular bypass and hernia repair.

The team reviewed a total of 498,875 surgeries, finding that 5.7 percent culminated in unplanned readmissions just 30 days after the procedure, suggesting signs of surgical complications.

Surgical site infections were responsible for an overwhelming 19.5 percent of readmissions and lower extremity vascular bypass was the surgery most commonly linked to readmissions, with 14.9 percent of patients returning to the hospital in less than one month. In total, surgical site infections were the cause of more than one-third of those readmissions.

Researchers found little correlation between complications noted at the time of surgery and whether a patient was readmitted to the hospital.

“Readmission after surgery was associated with new post-discharge complications related to the procedure and not exacerbation of prior index hospitalization complications, suggesting that readmissions after surgery are a measure of post-discharge complications,” the researchers concluded. “These data should be considered when developing quality indicators and policies penalizing hospitals for surgical readmission.”

Surgical site infections increasingly common

The results of this study support another study published one year earlier, conducted by the RAND Corporation and the Center for Health Policy at Columbia University, suggesting that many hospitals are not properly following infection guidelines or offering adequate support to prevent infections.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one out of every 25 hospital patients acquires an infection during their stay. In fact, 75,000 patients died in 2011 after contracting infections at the hospital. In 2013, another study revealed that hospital infections cost the U.S. health care system approximately $10 billion each year.

In total, surgical site infections cost roughly $21,000 per patient and have the largest overall financial impact on health care. Surgical site infections account for an overwhelming 33 percent of the total cost of hospital-acquired infections because of the frequency at which they occur.

A growing number of medical malpractice lawsuits have been filed by patients who have contracted hospital infections in recent years. Experts believe medical professionals can prevent these incidents by exercising reasonable standards of patient care. Often times these infections are the result of a failure of medical practitioners to practice proper hygiene. Staff members treat many patients concurrently, allowing them to easily spread harmful pathogens.

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