Outpatient surgery centers that perform procedures such as colonoscopies and even plastic surgery are ignoring basic rules of infection control, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found.
The study audited 68 surgery centers in three states — Maryland, North Carolina and Oklahoma — and found that nearly 68 percent had at least one violation of proper procedure.
Nearly 20 percent were not following rules for hand-washing and wearing gloves. More than 28 percent handled medication incorrectly, and the same percentage did not correctly reprocess used surgical equipment. Another 46 percent used equipment that monitors blood sugar incorrectly.
“These are basic fundamentals of infection control, things like cleaning your hands, cleaning surfaces in patient care areas,” said Dr. Melissa Schaefer of the CDC, the lead author of the study.
Some of the centers had not been inspected in 12 years.
The Department of Health and Human Services is going to expand its hospital infection control plan to include outpatient surgery centers, as well as dialysis centers, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
The CDC is offering surgery centers an infection-control audit tool so that they can conduct their own inspections, and states are now required to use the tool to inspect surgery centers that participate in Medicare.
Dr. David Shapiro of the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association told the AP that the study will cause surgery centers to “redouble our efforts to improve patient care. Any incident is one too many.”
According to the study, 5,000 ambulatory surgery centers preformed more than 6 million procedures in 2007.
