Fighting Infection: Inside Surgery Centers
June 8, 2010— -- A Nevada doctor is facing more than 20 felony charges for what prosecutors say he did inside an outpatient surgery center. Prosecutors say he encouraged employees to reuse vials of a medicine to save money.
An investigation revealed the staff used clean needles, but the syringes and vials that contained the medicine were used more than once. The result: A hepatitis outbreak in which 6 or 7 people were allegedly directly infected, and more than 100 people were allegedly indirectly infected.
Infection Control
A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds similar cost-cutting measures and safety lapses at outpatient ambulatory surgical centers across the country.
Researchers at the CDC surveyed a random sample of outpatient surgical centers and found that 67.6 percent of the centers studied had at least one lapse in infection control.
Infection control refers to things like hand hygiene, injection safety and medication handling, equipment reprocessing, environmental cleaning and handling of blood sugar monitoring equipment.
Ambulatory surgical centers, like the one in Nevada, are increasingly popular settings for operations that don't require a patient to be hospitalized, surgeries like eye, dental or foot surgery.
Doctors perform 6 million procedures each year at ambulatory surgical centers. Some of these centers are part of a hospital system, but others operate independently.
"They are not being regulated with anywhere near the thoroughness and completeness and frequency that large hospitals are," said Dr. William Schaffner from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. "They have fallen between the regulatory cracks."
