IAQ and Hospitals - by
Katie Long
February 7, 2009
Very few people want
to spend time in hospitals. Sure, there are the doctors, nurses, and
surgeons whose livelihood depends on it, but they’re getting paid to
be there unlike the majority of population. Be it sickness or
injury, a trip to ER usually involves a certain level of fear. For
those of you in the Houston area, the Texas Medical Center is a hop,
skip and jump away offering 47 institutions to aid in your medical
quest plus progressive techniques and procedures that promise you’ll
get the best treatment possible. Being so close to the country’s
leading medical facility and top docs can alleviate a fair amount of
said anxiety and fear, which is a welcome relief considering
on any given day in the United States some ninety
thousand people are in intensive care. Over a year, an estimated
five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly
all of us will come to spend some amount of time there. AND THAT’S
ONLY THE I.C.U.! In 2007 and at our fair Medical Center alone, 5.5
million patients paid a visit. With so many lives at stake and,
more generally, with so many bodies co-existing in such cramped
quarters it is understood that strict sanitation and safety
precautions are taken.
The word hygiene
comes from Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, who was
the daughter of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. Since the advent
of the Industrial Revolution (c.1750-1850) and the discovery of the
germ theory of disease in the second half of the nineteenth century,
hygiene and sanitation have been at the forefront of the struggle
against illness and disease. Of particular importance in medical
history, puerperal fever was one of those diseases that intrigued
and baffled doctors in the nineteenth century. The disease was
conquered when obstetricians began washing their hands between
deliveries. Puerperal fever was eradicated with cleanliness.
Long
gone are the days of mice, lice and fleas hopping from patient to
patient. Steps are taken to insure instruments are sterilized and
entire rooms sanitized. If the doctor is going to be poking around
inside you, you would be appalled to discover they hadn’t washed
their hands first and were wearing gloves. Yet
with all the safeguards how is it that people are still getting sick
just from being in the hospital. Deadly germs are
still being spread between patients but unlike the days of yore it
isn’t necessarily from direct contact with contaminated objects.
Hospitals seems so sterile that most people don’t think about the
risk they are put in due to airborne threats, invisible to the naked
eye but being pumped into operation rooms and waiting rooms
throughout the country. Hospital IAQ (indoor air quality) is a
problem and if the institutions would turn their attention to the
A/C systems they would realize their hospitals were not as sanitary
as most believe.
Hospital infections kill
more Americans each year than AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents
combined. Scarier still, about three of every 100 operations
performed in the United States are complicated by surgical site
infections. Compared with uninfected patients, patients developing
surgical site infections spend an additional 6.5 days in the
hospital, are more likely to be readmitted to the hospital, and are
more likely to die. In the Intensive Care Unit, I.V.
line infections are so common
that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.’s put five
million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show
that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected.
Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United
States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the
time, depending on how sick one is at the start.
Fortunately these
issues are being addressed. In 2007 Texas passed a law to hold
hospitals responsible for on site infections. This
law on hospital
reporting requires hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers to
reports surgical-site infections and central-line bloodstream
infections in intensive-care units. It also requires reporting for
pediatric and adolescent hospitals/units. The first report was to
be issued June 2008, but the state failed to fund the initiative,
which has delayed its implementation. While reporting instances of
infection and recording data on the subject is helpful in the long
run, some things can be done immediately to reduce the threat of
airborne microorganisms, such as fungus, bacteria and viruses.
With all this in mind, we should all feel very lucky
to live in such close proximity to not only a large quantity of
healthcare institutions but also institutions of outstanding
quality.
Duct Cleaning and HVAC Systems Cleaning in Texas
