Hospitals improve care in 3 areas, report says

An accrediting group found consistent improvement from 2002 to 2005.
CHICAGO (AP) -- U.S. hospitals have improved the care they offer for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia, according to a report released Tuesday by a hospital accrediting group.
The Joint Commission report examines how well more than 3,000 hospitals follow guidelines for care of the potentially deadly conditions. It found that quality improved consistently from 2002 to 2005.
Ninety-six percent of heart attack patients were given aspirin when they arrived at the hospital in 2005, which can save lives, the report found. That represented an improvement of 3.6 percentage points from 2002.
But about 40 percent of heart-failure patients left the hospital in 2005 without specific instructions about follow-up care. That was an improvement of 28 percentage points since 2002, but still too high, said Dr. Dennis O'Leary, president of the Joint Commission.
The biggest improvement was in providing advice to pneumonia patients on how to stop smoking. In 2002, pneumonia patients got the advice from hospital staff only 37.2 percent of the time. In 2005, that measure had climbed to 80 percent.
Some shortcomings
Joint Commission inspectors visited more than 1,500 hospitals in 2005 and found that 38 percent had not standardized abbreviations for easily confused medical terms.
Seventeen percent were not practicing a timeout before surgeries, a pause recommended to allow doctors to confirm they have the correct patient and are set to do the correct procedure on the correct body part.
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