Resources for Patient Advocates and Providers

Hospitals may say, ‘We have a good infection rate, it’s .01.’ Well, I was that .01. I’m that person who got the infection. If your infection rate isn’t zero, you don’t have a good infection rate.”
Resources for Patient Advocates

As a patient advocate, your top priority is the safety of whomever you’re advocating.  What can you do to protect them from infection before their joint implant procedure?
  • Research the quality scores and infection rates of the hospital.
  • Ask the surgeon about the guidelines they use to reduce deep joint infection risk.
  • Ask the surgeon what they use for patient warming.
  • Do your own research to be informed about forced-air warming’s link to deep joint infections and recommend a doctor who uses air-free patient warming.
Here is my Patient Advocacy Profile:
rosie_bartel_patient_profile.pdf
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What is a patient advocate? Information from the National Patient Safety Foundation

Resources from the Caregiver Action Network

Success Stories from the Patient and Family Engagement Resource Center
Best Practices and Tools from Patient and Family Engagement Resources

Share your story on my blog.
Resources for Providers

As a healthcare provider, your primary objective is, “First, do no harm.” Even though every guideline is followed, at some point a patient who entrusts their care to you will end up with a periprosthetic joint infection. What else can you do?

THINK ROSIE Campaign:
During my study with Partnership for Patients, we learned that nurses and physicians can see a hand washing sign and still not follow the guidelines. Partnership for Patients and I created the THINK ROSIE Campaign to personalize the potential consequences of not washing hands properly.

I am an example of the devastating effects of a preventable infection. Follow your hospital’s infection control procedures. Infections are not statistics—they are debilitating and life-changing consequences of a failure to do no harm.


Patient warming:
I’ve read probably 20 articles—pro and con—about this subject and I encourage you to do the same. Some say it doesn’t matter that these particles are being blown around.  That doesn’t sit well with me.  If there are all of these protocols for keeping the known particles near the floor where they belong, how can you say it doesn’t matter that they are being transported to the surgical site by the rising hot air currents from these blowers?

If you have a foreign metal implant then you have the perfect place for an airborne particle to cause an infection. A single bacterium can form a protective biofilm layer on an implant and cause a devastating infection.

Why take the chance of causing patient suffering?  All of these things are choices that providers need to make.
Rosies Dream