Children’s hospitals reduce deadly infections

In this file photo: Dr. James Komer, a pediatrician, gives up a check up to Shawna Bellamy of Middletown's 19-month-old son, Caiden, at Dayton Children's Specialty Care Center at Atrium Medical Center on Tuesday Oct. 4, 2011. Ohio’s children’s hospitals did better than their peers nationally in curbing infections that kill thousands of people each year, according to a Consumer Reports study.

Staff photo by Samantha Grier In this file photo: Dr. James Komer, a pediatrician, gives up a check up to Shawna Bellamy of Middletown's 19-month-old son, Caiden, at Dayton Children's Specialty Care Center at Atrium Medical Center on Tuesday Oct. 4, 2011. Ohio’s children’s hospitals did better than their peers nationally in curbing infections that kill thousands of people each year, according to a Consumer Reports study.

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By Ben Sutherly, Staff Writer Updated 8:23 AM Thursday, January 26, 2012

DAYTON — Ohio’s children’s hospitals did better than their peers nationally in curbing infections that kill thousands of people each year, according to a Consumer Reports study out today.

The study focused on central-line catheters, which deliver medication, nutrition and fluids. The catheters can spread infection through the body if they aren’t inserted in sterile conditions or kept meticulously clean.

In 2009, an estimated 27,000 to 65,000 central-line bloodstream infections were acquired in U.S. hospitals — including 12,000 to 28,000 in ICUs — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to a fourth of those infections were fatal.

The Consumer Reports study found that in 2009, pediatric intensive care units nationwide had infection rates that were 20 percent higher than national rates of adult ICUs.

Of the 92 pediatric ICUs examined in the report, five had no central-line catheter bloodstream infections in 2010 and therefore received a “5” rating. Two pediatric ICUs received the lowest rating of “1” for reporting infection rates more than twice the national average.

The study gave above-average scores of “4” to four children’s hospitals in Akron, Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

For Ohio, Consumer Reports included only those children’s hospitals that reported their data to the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit that collects and disseminates information about individual hospitals. Consumer Reports relies on Leapfrog for a minority of states, including Ohio, that in 2010 did not require hospitals to disclose data on central-line catheter infections. The federal government recently began requiring all hospitals — including those in Ohio — to report such data.

The Children’s Medical Center of Dayton does not report data to Leapfrog, claiming the process is too resource-intensive. If it had, the hospital would have received a score of “3” for the year 2010 and the top score of “5” for the years 2009 and 2011. Because Dayton Children’s is a smaller children’s hospital, it only took one infection in June 2010 to drop the hospital’s score from a “5” to a “3.”

Hospitals received a score of 5 only if they have had no central-line catheter infections in 2010. Dayton Children’s officials said the hospital has not had such an infection since June 2010, and said such infections are down significantly from 2005. For its efforts to prevent such infections, it won a national quality and safety award in 2006 from Child Health Corp. of America, a business alliance of 42 North American children’s hospitals.

The federal government is expected to begin releasing some infection data soon, said Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports health ratings center. It wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday how much of that data the federal government will disclose.

“We are absolutely certain that consumers have this high on their list of things they want to know,” Santa said. “ ... If I had a child who was sick and battling a disease and they ended up dying of an infection that was preventable, I just can’t imagine how upset I would be.”

Dr. Vipul Patel, Dayton Children’s medical director of critical care and pediatric ICU, said the hospital since 2005 has put in place various precautions to curb central-line catheter infections.

In recent surveys conducted through observations, Dayton Children’s found compliance with its hand-hygiene requirements ranged from 94 percent to 98 percent, a spokeswoman said.

“Prevention of these infections is critical to the health of the patient,” said Dr. Sherman Alter, Dayton Children’s medical director of infectious disease.

Dayton Children’s said such infections also greatly increase the cost of a child’s hospitalization, from an average of $6,300 without infections to $45,000 for hospitalizations with infections.

Santa said many hospitals to date have not had to disclose their infection data. That’s made it difficult to determine whether those nonreporting hospitals even track such data. “Any hospital that’s not keeping track of these infection rates is a hospital that we should be very, very wary of,” he said.

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