Friday, January 25, 2008

Washing Their Hands

Those of us who advocate evidence-based practice (EBP) in sentencing and corrections usually point to the successes after decades of development of EBP in medicine. So imagine how excited we are about the prospects for adoption of EBP in our realm when we read stories like this:

It’s a question no hospital patient should have to ask: “Hey, doc, did you wash your hands?”

But in an era of rising rates of drug-resistant infections and overburdened medical staffs, hygiene experts say the best-protected patients are those willing to take safety into their own hands — by asking health workers to wash theirs.

Doctors, nurses and other hospital staffer too busy, too distracted — or, sometimes, too arrogant — to wash up are the target of a growing movement aimed at cutting rates of hospital-acquired infections that kill nearly 100,000 people in the U.S. each year, according to federal estimates.

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