meehawl

The AMA may be regressive when it comes to health care reform, but it does sometimes display an impressive ability to change. Or maybe not. At its annual meeting, the AMA voted to recommend white coats be banned in hospitals to prevent nosocomial infection spread. Then it decided to reconsider the recommendation (for anti-infection dress codes) until there’s more evidence they work. Or something. It’s as if scrubs didn’t exist. Shades of Semmelweis. It seems that sometimes scientific/clinical skepticism can lead people to disbelieve that improvement could really be that simple.

Tags: AMA, American Medical Association, hospitals, Ignaz Semmelweis, infection, medicine, sepsis, white coat by mike
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Buried on Page 31 of the [US Senate Finance Committee's policy reform document] was a proposal to “Modify the Requirements for Tax-Exempt Hospitals,” which would require nonprofit hospitals to maintain minimal levels of charitable activity, limit aggressive collections, and restrict charges to the uninsured and indigent. The proposed penalties for noncompliance are severe: Hospitals that can’t prove their “community benefit” will lose the tax benefits associated with nonprofit status … $93.5 billion in federal subsidies are provided every year in the form of tax breaks. But research shows that nonprofit hospitals behave no differently from for-profit ones.

Tags: charity, corporate welfare, health policy, hospitals, medicine by mike
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In the UK, new NHS mandates prohibit doctors in hospitals from wearing ties, or long sleeves, out of concerns that such “professional” attire could carry germs.

I did not carry any poison, or other cause of disease, to any patient of mine ; and if not I, then how should he become capable of doing so ? He is a gentleman who is scrupulously careful of his personal appearance, of great experience as a practitioner, and well informed as to modern opinions on the contagion of childbed fever. Still, those of you who are contagionists will say that he carried the poison from house to house ; and if so, then you ought to give some rationale of the fact. Did he carry it on his hands ? But a gentleman’s hands are clean. – Charles Delucena Meigs

Tags: Charles Delucena Meigs, childbirth fever, germ theory, hospitals, medicine, MRSA, puerperal fever, scrubs, sepsis, ties by mike
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