Simple measures

One of the healthcare policy changes put forward by Governor Rendell was a set of incentives to hospitals to decrease hospital-derived infections. A current Inquirer article looks at one way to reduce infections, by standardizing handling of I-V lines, from how the site is made sterile to how frequently the staff checks whether such a line is still needed. Some of these changes have shown the ability to reduce infection rates many-fold. There are other possibilities for reducing zones of contamination such as ubiquitous computer keyboards. Let's hope all such ideas get thorough consideration, as it could save many lives directly, and even more through the containment of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.