karma & supply shortages

last week i brought in an article on c. diff to my preceptor. for her reading pleasure, of course. but you see, it brought on the bad karma. the next night i come in to work and suddenly we have 7 patients on contact(and 2 of these on droplet as well) isolation... for c. diff (as well as a few choice other bugs added to a couple of them). i can imagine it was my payback for being a good little student. now here is the problem.

the c. diff article (published in AJN recently) stated how c. diff has been appearing in patients who are not on antibiotics. of course we all know that c. diff is highly contagious and can certainly be spread from patient to patient by not washing with soap and water before and after any contact with the infected patients. but it also brings up the point that it is possibly equipment that is doing a lot of the spreading, such as dinemapp's and portable thermometer's. ok. i can understand that too. not a problem to actually do things manually. however, whenever you have a good number of your patients on isolation, supplies can be an issue. heck they are an issue for a floor full of regular patients. hospitals (well the one where i work) can be stingy on sending supplies to the floors. i cannot tell you how often we are constantly "stealing" from another floor or dept because we have run out of something. and it isn't like the supply people work from 11p-7a either. hospital administrators need to address this issue and make it into some sort of policy. enough supplies should be kept on the floors to accommodate as if the floor was full at all times. perhaps if they had supply people who didn't bring up the stuff and just drop it where they see fit, we could find things. perhaps if they developed a system with bar coding, like in a grocery store, where we could check things out as we use them, they would know what to bring us the next day or later that evening before they leave. something else has to be more efficient than what we have now.

i watched a show on discovery or tlc the other night about a surgeon who developed a bar code system for checking surgical supplies to cut down the incidence of surgical supplies being left in patients after surgery. i think it is a novel idea that has uses in other areas of the hospital as well. after all, the pharmacy is able to keep track of all the medications and resupply as needed, why can't material management keep track of the supplies? are they not as important as the meds? it could even possibly be more cost effective in the long run as well.. perhaps.