Correction plan not enough

Given all that has been written in recent years about the need for hospitals to stop infections from spreading among patients, a recently published report about MountainView Hospital is highly disturbing.

State health inspectors, working on behalf of the federal government, found so much risk at MountainView for contracting infections that the hospital’s qualification to participate in the Medicaid and Medicare insurance plans was placed in jeopardy.

Their inspection took place in July and the northwest Las Vegas hospital last week submitted a plan to correct its procedures.

MountainView Chief Executive Will Wagnon told Las Vegas Sun reporter Marshall Allen he is confident the necessary steps have been taken.

That may be, but a salient question remains: How were standards that can mean life or death for patients allowed to sink so low?

For years one of the major health care concerns has been the exposure of hospital patients to infections. Hospitals had gotten so bad by 2004 that Betsy McCaughey, a health policy expert and former New York lieutenant governor, formed the national Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths (www.hospitalinfection.org).

Her organization says it has been proved that hospital infections are almost entirely preventable. Nevertheless, it says, infections contracted in hospitals are the fourth-largest killer in America. Of the estimated 2 million patients infected every year, about 103,000 die.

Given the seriousness of these statistics, hospitals should be overly meticulous in setting and enforcing all known standards for keeping surfaces ultrasanitary.

But at MountainView, inspectors found major violations, including leaking bags of intravenous fluids and old intravenous fluid bags that had not been disposed of, a surgical technician with bloody gloves touching surfaces outside the operating room, blood on the floor of a lab, and a specialist typing on a keyboard while wearing contaminated gloves.

Health inspectors should not be content with just a corrections plan. They should learn how such major violations of basic standards could have occurred. The information might help in the national fight to protect patients.