Veterans Affairs Medical Centers are often criticized for issues like long wait times and manipulated wait lists, but one issue the VA has successfully tackled is healthcare-associated infections, according to column in the New York Times.
Non-VA hospitals in the U.S. have made strides in reducing some HAIs — such as central line-associated bloodstream infections, which have decreased 46 percent between 2008 and 2013 — but not all. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections, Clostridium difficile infections and catheter-associated urinary tract infections continue to present a major challenge to many hospitals.
VA acute-care hospitals are not perfect, but they have proven that more can be done to reduce HAIs in a timely manner, according to the column author, journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg.
For instance, VA hospital across the country implemented a handful of anti-MRSA measures in 2007 related to screening and surveillance of the infection as well as major culture changes.
VA facilities began swabbing every patient for MRSA upon arrival, after transfers and upon discharge; hand hygiene compliance was stressed; and nurses were hired to specifically oversee infection control programs. Within five years of implementing the anti-MRSA measures, VA hospitals saw the infections decrease by 68.8 percent.
The VA has since expanded the anti-MRSA program to its nursing homes with similar results and is now beginning to apply the program to other types of HAIs. Despite the relative success of the VA's programs, Ms. Rosenberg argues other hospitals have yet to take a page from their book.
"The VA's MRSA control project is not a tiny pilot," writes Ms. Rosenberg. "It's a dramatic and sustained improvement across the largest health system in the country — and it has had surprisingly little effect on practices at other hospitals."
Yet even the VA doesn't have all the answers. Nashville, Tenn.-based Hospital Corporation of America implemented VA-inspired strategies to decrease infection rates until it discovered a method that was even more effective — universal decolonization, which can be very effective if the institutions employing it do so whole-heartedly.
According to Ms. Rosenberg, institutional commitment is the key the VA discovered to preventing MRSA, investing money and additional staff to the cause, and it is what many hospitals still lack.
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