Elder Law

Health & Human Services Agency To Provide Millions to Prevent Nursing Home Infections

By Levin & Perconti

McKnight?s News recently reported on funding developments at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that will provide support for groups seeking to improve the quality of care at nursing homes. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality said it will give $34 million to different research projects working to prevent medical-care-associated infections at nursing homes and similar facilities.

The funding project is a joint effort from the Health & Human Services Agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, National Institute of Health, and others. The impetus for the research is the realization that while there is growing information about the spread of infections in hospitals, there is much less knowledge of the spread of these infections at long-term care facilities like nursing homes.

As the director of the managing agency explained, ?With these new projects we can apply what has worked in reducing infections in hospitals to other settings and ultimately help patients feel confident that they are in safe hands.?

The need for improvements in this area is well-documents. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that over 2 million cases of these types of infections strike residents each year?leading to over 100,000 deaths. These are infections that a patient contracts while at a facility due to the contagious nature of many of these spaces. In other words, bring many sick individuals together in one place makes it vital for a facility to take extreme precautions so that the one patient?s sickness does not spread to others. For too often residents seem to be on the road to recovery from other ailments until they contract an infection while at a long-term care facility. The complications from those nursing home infections are often deadly.

Full post as published by Illinois Nursing Home Abuse Blog on November 14, 2010 (boomark / email).