Many people in Seattle were shocked to learn that improper device cleaning at a Children’s Hospital surgery center placed more than 10,000 patients at risk of infection. Seattle Children’s Hospital is notifying patients at this clinic going to 2010. In addition, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesperson recently advised Medscape that a Joint Commission inspection of Kadlec Health System clinics in Washington State found multiple flaws and inconsistencies in its clinics’ medical device-cleaning protocols. The Seattle Times and Medscape articles can be found here:
[Seattle Children’s warns of potential infection risk](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/seattle-childrens-bellevue-clinic-warns-of-exposure-to-potential-risk-of-infection/)
[Dirty Reusable Instruments Also Plague Outpatient Settings, CDC Warns](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/850894)
Headlines in recent years have demonstrated that improper sterilization of medical scopes and other equipment can spread deadly infections in hospital settings. However, these more recent revelations regarding dirty medical equipment were found in outpatient clinics. The issues at Seattle Children’s Hospital’s surgery center and Kadlec Health System’s clinics demonstrated this risk is not limited to hospitals. Indeed, these outpatient medical facilities and doctors’ offices present a similar risk of infection from improperly sterilized medical equipment as hospitals.
These recent incidents prompted an advisory from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The advisory states that all facilities should hold regular audits for observance to cleaning, disinfection, sterilization and storage procedures. In addition, it advises facilities to establish clear procedures for responding to any errors or failures in medical device reprocessing. The CDC Advisory can be found here:
[Immediate Need for Healthcare Facilities to Review Procedures for Cleaning, Disinfecting, and Sterilizing Reusable Medical Devices](http://emergency.cdc.gov/han/han00382.asp)
While the revelations at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Kadlec were surprising to the public, it is more shocking to most people that even with these revelations medical negligence cases involving infections are notoriously difficult. This is because the plaintiff in a medical negligence case must prove both that the medical facility was negligent in their infection-prevention measures and that the negligence was the cause of the infection “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty.” Since there are a myriad of sources of infection, proving negligence was the source of infection to a “reasonable degree of medical certainty” remains very difficult.
