Saturday, December 16, 2017

What if they had completely separate hospitals for infectious and non-infectious patients?

One of the risks of going to a hospital is that you might pick up a hospital-acquired infection, like MRSA or C. Diff.

At the root, there are a lot of infections in hospitals because many patients are infectious.

But there are also many patients who aren't infectious at all. For example, if you're in the hospital for surgery or chemotherapy to have a broken bone set or to give birth, you don't present any risk of contagion to others - but contagion may present a greater-than-usual risk to you.

So what if they had completely separate hospitals for contagious and non-contagious patients?  Different buildings, different doctors and nurses, never the twain shall meet.

Apart from money, is there any reason for not doing this? The only thing I can think of is that a certain subset of patients may or may not be infectious, and we don't know yet.  (I can think of several potential ways to handle that, but that's probably something better left to medical professionals.)  However, at the same time, there are also patients who are definitely not contagious - the surgeries and broken bones and childbirth that I mentioned above.  Is there any medical or non-money-related logistical reason not to keep them separate?

1 comment:

laura k said...

I think some hospitals have infectious disease areas or departments. It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure when I did some hospital visiting volunteering, there was an area that was infectious only. So everyone took precautions walking in or walking out.

One of the issues with separate hospitals would be that many people have multiple health issues. So all the expertise and equipment would have to be duplicated. There would have to be an ER (but ambulances wouldn't know which ER to use, unless they were sure the patient was infectious or not -- and often they won't know), a cardiac unit, an ICU, a surgical unit, etc etc. That's not only a problem of money, it's a problem of expertise and logistics.