and only legal action by infected victims is likely to get doctors to clean up their act, an infectious diseases expert, Frank Bowden, says.
Even after a two-year national campaign to urge staff to wash their hands between patients, about half still fail to do so. A national audit of doctors by the healthcare safety and quality commission last year showed 51 per cent failed to comply with hygiene standards.
The result is that hundreds of patients end up with ''hospital-acquired infections'', which can kill them.
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Professor Bowden, of the Australian National University, says it would take only one patient to sue a hospital successfully to transform doctors' behaviour.
''Once it becomes plain to the patient population that there is a clear link between the behaviour of their medical attendants and the risk of them contracting an infection while in hospital, it is only going to take one high-profile case of a patient successfully suing a hospital for the climate on hygiene to change.''
In his book Gone Viral - The Germs that Share our Lives, published yesterday, Professor Bowden says that once a legal precedent has been set, the cost of hospital-acquired infection will be ''directly measurable … not hidden as it currently is''.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/unwashed-hands-put-doctors-in-legal-peril-20110701-1gv6t.html#ixzz1QvDsiR1P
