One in Four Michigan Hospitals' Dirty Secret

Watchdog group says patients, clinicians and all health-care workers are put at risk when proper hand hygiene policies aren’t observed. (Photo by hygienematters via Flickr / Creative Commons)

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Of all the places you’d expect routine handwashing guidelines are rigorously enforced, hospital would be near the top of the list, right?

No, according to a report recently released by The Leapfrog Group, a hospital watchdog group. It found that nearly one in four Michigan hospitals have not implemented hand-hygiene policies.

Michigan hospitals compare with hospitals nationwide, according to the watchdog group. The survey was voluntary and the results, analyzed by Castlight Health, found that while hospitals overall showed improvement in 2014 for hand hygiene, rural hospitals aren’t performing as well as their urban counterparts.

“Rural or urban, affluent or safety net, there’s no excuse for a hospital to fail on hand hygiene,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a news release. “It puts patients, clinicians, and all health care workers at risk when handwashing is not a priority. Hospital-acquired infections kill about 10 percent of those afflicted, according to the Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

“While we trust our doctors and nurses to make us well, many hospital-acquired infections are caused by the contaminated hands of health-care workers,” said Dr. Jennifer Schneider, M.D., M.S., chief medical officer for Castlight Health. “Hospitals must not only put the right policies in place – they must also enforce them. This is perhaps one of the easiest steps a hospital can take toward patient safety, but it’s also one of the most important.”

Key findings from this report include:

• The percentage of hospitals meeting all 10 of Leapfrog’s hand-hygiene practices increased from 69 percent in 2013 to 77 percent in 2014.
• Urban hospitals continue to outperform rural hospitals; about 20 percent more urban hospitals met Leapfrog’s standard and showed greater year-over-year improvement in meeting the standard.
• There is significant geographic variation in adoption of hand-hygiene safe practices: in five states, more than 90 percent of reporting hospitals met all practices, while in six states, only 60 percent or less of reporting hospitals met all practices.

Search for the database of Michigan hospitals here. More than half of Michigan’s 102 hospitals declined to participate in the survey. Of those that did, 34 were fully compliant and 11 were not fully compliant, according to the Economic Alliance for Michigan.

“We applaud those hospitals willing to disclose various quality and safety measurements to the public,” said EAM President Bret Jackson. “Hospital transparency leads to better care and lower costs.”

The only fully compliant hospitals in the Detroit metro area are Botsford Hospital, Farmington Hills; Chelsea Community Hospital, Chelsea; Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Detroit; Detroit Receiving Hospital, Detroit; Harper-Hutzel Hospital, Detroit; Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital, Commerce Township; Sinai-Grace Hospital, Detroit; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital-Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti; St. Joseph Mercy Livingston Hospital, Howell; St. Joseph Mercy Oakland, Pontiac; St. Joseph Mercy, Livonia; and University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, Ann Arbor.