Medical standards targeted

WASHINGTON — Dr. Mark Chassin, president of a leading medical standards organization, on Thursday announced a new program designed to improve health-care safety practices, starting with a rigorous approach toward handwashing by hospital staffers.

Chassin, who leads the Joint Commission, said medical errors were among the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States. The commission is a standard-setting and accrediting body for hospitals and other health-care organizations.

Handwashing failures contribute to health-care-linked infections that kill nearly 100,000 Americans each year and cost U.S. hospitals $4 billion to $29 billion annual to combat, according to the announcement.

Chassin's announcement comes after Hearst Newspapers published the results of a special investigation called "Dead by Mistake" revealing that 247 people die every day in the United States from infections contracted in hospitals.

The Joint Commission's new program, the Center for Transforming Health Care, is funded by hospitals and other large health-care providers.

The center will apply modern management techniques to hospital safety, starting with the simple low-tech problem of handwashing in medical situations.

Hand washing failures are a critical patient safety problem, Chassin said, "one that requires fixes far more complex than just putting up signings urging caregivers to wash their hands."

Eight leading hospitals and health systems have volunteered to address handwashing failures as a critical patient safety problem, according to Chassin's announcement.

Participants are: Cedars-Sinai Health System, Los Angeles; Exempla Lutheran Medical Center, Wheat Ridge, Colo.; Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee; The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Baltimore; Memorial Hermann Health Care System, Houston; Trinity Health, Novi, Mich.; Virtua, Marlton, N.J.; Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, N.C.

"Demanding that health care workers try harder is not the answer," Chassin said. "These health care organizations have the courage to step forward to tackle the problem of hand washing by digging deep to find out where the breakdowns take place so we can create targeted solutions that will work now and keep working in the future."

Chassin said that a "comprehensive approach is the only solution to preventing bad patient outcomes."