Greedy Trial Lawyer
Wash Your Damn Lab Coats!
Category: The Latest Baddest
When a doctor visits you in the hospital wearing that spiffy-looking lab coat it is likely he is accompanied by a million or so little buddies, a month's supply of dangerous bacteria.
MRSA Report Cites Irresponsibility Everywhere
My colleague Betsy McCaughey, chair of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, publishes in July's Best Hospitals 2007 of US News and World Report that hospitals must begin to take responsibility for their infection rates, and begin to take the necessary steps to clean themselves up.She cites a study that shows that "65 percent of physicians and other medical professionals admitted they hadn't washed their lab coat in at least a week, even though they knew it was dirty. Nearly 16 percent said they hadn't put on a clean lab coat in at least a month. Lab coats become covered in bacteria when doctors lean over the bedsides of patients who carry the organisms. Days later the bacteria are still alive, repeatedly contaminating doctors' hands and being carried to other patients."
From EVERY PATIENT'S ADVOCATE
If doctors aren't going to wash their lab coats why don't hospitals hand them freshly laundered ones as they enter the facility? Or, make the docs wear those cute patient gowns that tie up in the back?
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