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Staph Infection
updated: Sep 05, 2012, 9:19 AM

By Edhat Subscriber

I would like to post a question please. I want to know who out there contracted a staph infection after surgery or procedure at Cottage Hospital - both the new Cottage as well as the old Cottage. Also want to know if they reported it to the hospital or not or any other information.

thanks!

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Comments in order of when they were received | (reverse order)

COMMENT 316325P	2012-09-05 09:26 AM
I know of three different people who got staph infections at Cottage Hospital after having a procedure there. Each of them heard of others who did too. Apparently it's an ongoing problem that the hospital administration tries to keep quiet.
COMMENT 316333	2012-09-05 09:43 AM
MRSA staph, being resistant to most harsh antibiotics, is found in most hospitals, nursing homes and other medical facilities. Precautions vary from good to none. Make sure all health workers wash their hands in your presence before touching you. Surgeries are a roll of the dice....
COMMENT 316334	2012-09-05 09:44 AM
All hospitals struggle with controlling infections within the hospital. Staph, specifically, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, is a “staph” germ that does not get better with the first-line antibiotics that usually cure staph infections, and is found in most hospitals. It has commonly been said that the most dangerous place to be when you are sick is in the hospital. I am not a big fan of the Cottage management team , but as far as the staff go (who treat patients even though they have MRSA), they are the heros. There are strict protocols which go into place to attempt to control the spread of such diseases. Immediately post-op is the most dangerous time for patients, and awareness and attention can prevent severe outbreaks of deadly disease, but it takes just one careless act or person to spread the disease.
COMMENT 316343	2012-09-05 10:02 AM
I think this is called death by "post-surgical complications". New Cottage has state of the art infection control built into its systems. Older buildings were endemically infected and virtually impossible to get "clean" again. Good you asked the difference between old and new Cottage. New Cottage gives you the best fighting chance. One more reason to treat your body with care and avoid the many life-style choice "diseases" out there, so you only need hospitalization in the most dire situations where death could come without medical intervention; and not because of intervention. Due caution when one touts the "miracles of modern medicine" and expects easy fixes for their own poor choices. Live life soberly and well.
COMMENT 316344	2012-09-05 10:02 AM
I had three surgeries in 2011 all at cottage and I'm fine. Are some people more susceptible to Staph than others maybe?
COMMENT 316357	2012-09-05 10:30 AM
343 "Due caution when one touts the "miracles of modern medicine" and expects easy fixes for their own poor choices. Live life soberly and well." What the heck does this have to do at all with the original post. What the heck are you talking about? Sounds like some soapboxing and self righteousness going on there.
COMMENT 316364P	2012-09-05 10:33 AM
Good advice, 343! But what is "new Cottage" - and if one has to go to the hospital, how does one get to go there? And how does Goleta Cottage rank in this consideration? From what I found in rankings, patients rank Goleta slightly higher in many categories. And no Santa Barbara County hospital ranks in the USNews best category, link and various ratings. Other rankings are here, for infections; interestingly, for 88,889 patient days in 2011, Cottage reported no cases of MRSA.
COMMENT 316373	2012-09-05 10:54 AM
343... I agree. So many of us live carelessly and expect hospitals and other care givers to be above reproach, 'coz we certainly don't, and provide all the answers to our health problems. Drug resistant bacteria is one of the problems in our health care system. Sorry OP, for going OT with this. Are you looking for other plaintiffs to start a class action suit?
COMMENT 316375	2012-09-05 11:01 AM
This is an important topic! There are other things to worry about besides MRSA. Pseudomonas in a surgical wound is scary. If anyone has a script or ideas on how to screen local docs about their office infection stats, please share.
COMMENT 316380	2012-09-05 11:12 AM
My grandpa died from staph infection at cottage. He went in for lung issue and came out with staph and that pushed him over and died shortly thereafter. We know of multiple people who have experienced similar issues.
COMMENT 316447	2012-09-05 01:47 PM
I had surgery a month ago and spent one night in the "new" Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and contracted staph (fortunately not MRSA) infection. I have heard from one person who was there at the ER with a cut finger, and he contracted staph and is on his third round of antibiotics. All of these infections need to be reported to Cottage for their records. Having surgery in a new state of the art facility should not warranted contracting a potentially lethal disease. My neighbor's grandmother died of a staph infection after surgery at Cottage. In other places, one friend had staph in his spine and had his entire spine replaced, another friend was in IC for 10 months with staph (again not MRSA). this is serious stuff and Cottage Hospital needs to respond to their patients who contract staph in their facilities.
COMMENT 316483	2012-09-05 02:45 PM
@447 Spine transplant? Sounds as nutty as some of the "lifestyle" nannies here. Staph is a routine problem in every hospital, made more dangerous by the abuse of antibiotics as placebos for uninformed health consumers. Know your stats, then hope for the best.
COMMENT 316486	2012-09-05 02:50 PM
Consumer Reports showed Cottage Hospital scored only 42 out of 100 in hospital safety and was rated worse than average in patient deaths. Let's hope they are working to improve their record. The best, i.e. the highest safety rating, hospital in the area is in Santa Maria, Marian Regional Medical Center.
COMMENT 316487P	2012-09-05 02:53 PM
The August issue of "Consumer Reports" rated Santa Barbara Cottage pretty low in the bloodstream infections category.
COMMENT 316488	2012-09-05 02:53 PM
@483 - the staph went into his spine and he now has a titanium spine.
COMMENT 316489P	2012-09-05 02:54 PM
@486 Your comment was not there when I started writing mine!
COMMENT 316498	2012-09-05 03:12 PM
I didn't know you could even HAVE your spine replaced. Whoa. I had a C-section at old cottage almost 5 years ago. Had infection problems after I got home, never while in there. But maybe the maternity ward is a safer area than the rest of the hospital.
COMMENT 316519	2012-09-05 03:37 PM
It's really common to get staph infections at hospitals, ours is not an exception. The sad truth is that staph bacteria is incredibly virulent and is often present on things like sheets and bedding and on the skin of doctors and nurses and on surfaces at the hospital in both the recovery rooms and the prep rooms. It's really hard to kill. So if some gets into a wound or incision or onto a needle or an oxygen nasal tube, it's going to infect you. A large percentage of the population has staph bacteria on their own skin and in their mucous membranes without symptoms and when they have surgery, they can have that staph multiply due to lowered immunity. So you could have had staph already and never had any kind of problem. It's not uncommon at all. Hope you can recover quickly though.
COMMENT 316520	2012-09-05 03:39 PM
A friends father in law died within the last year due to MRSA complications from cottage.
COMMENT 316527	2012-09-05 03:49 PM
eeewww.
COMMENT 316537	2012-09-05 04:10 PM
Demanding anti-biotics as placebos is a life-style issue. Bad lifestyle choices will harm you and cost the rest of us more money than we want to keep paying. Yes, it is time for the Life Style Nanny to put anti-biotic abusers (Dr and Patient) into the naughty corner.
COMMENT 316538	2012-09-05 04:13 PM
My father ended up with a NASTY staph infection after having a pacemaker put in at Cottage. They ended up taking the pacemaker out and he had antibiotics directly into the heart area to clear it up.....took a long time.
COMMENT 316539	2012-09-05 04:13 PM
Staph lives on your skin, almost everyone's skin. You are either resistant to it or not. You cannot pin it on the hospital necessarily. You could have brought it in there or contracted it from a visitor.
COMMENT 316549	2012-09-05 04:26 PM
Yes we abuse antibiotics. But let's not forget that the meat industry is using antibiotics by the ton to keep the animals in the feedlots and poultry houses from getting sick and dying. This is one of the main reasons for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Unfortunately it doesn't matter if you eat meat or not because the bacteria doesn't skip vegetarians. They advise people to ask for the infection data from hospitals before you have a procedure but as you can see from these comments, it appears that many problems are not reported to the authorities, there is no requirement in CA to do this, so the reported infection rate at Cottage is erroneous.
COMMENT 316583	2012-09-05 05:31 PM
I believe that the regulations for reporting only apply if you are re-admitted because of an infection. If you are treated for an infection as an out-patient, it is not included. The laws vary by state, there is no national standard. Obviously, in countries with nationalized health care, it is much easier to gather data and address infection rates. We are far behind in the U.S.
COMMENT 316589	2012-09-05 05:42 PM
Check out this article in New York Times Farm Use of Antibiotics Defies Scrutiny By SABRINA TAVERNISE Published: September 3, 2012
COMMENT 316610	2012-09-05 06:27 PM
If you need a sugical proceedure, I would recommend looking into traveling to Thailand, namely Bangkok General Hospital, which makes our $900 MILLION dollar "modern" hospital look like a Third World hospital (bangkokhospitaldotcom)... Private rooms with a "family area", private nurse with 24 hour attention, I could go on, but you should look at the website as it explains more. There are OPTIONS people!
COMMENT 316629	2012-09-05 07:09 PM
Thailand? Are you serious? Even if you don't get a staph infection, try drug resistant TB on for size. How irresponsible to suggest going to another country that is known for serious TB infection outbreaks. You may have a private nurse, but that won't keep you safe from bacterium. My goodness!
COMMENT 316654	2012-09-05 08:19 PM
The recommendation for Thailand is actually a good one, their medical system is excellent. Yes, they are a tropical country, and there would be risks related to contagious diseases, but don't discount the idea because of that.
COMMENT 316672P	2012-09-05 10:14 PM
I'd LOVE to have Ron Werft or his assistant, Janet O'Neill from Cottage to address this nagging issue. How about it, Ron?
COMMENT 316695P	2012-09-06 07:13 AM
Gosh, didn't realize the world was such a dangerous place! :-)
HAPPY CAMPER	2012-09-06 07:41 AM
Another aspect of this-I contracted an infection from an outpatient surgery and was directed to the ER at Cottage on a Sunday where I sat there for almost 10 hours until they got around to diagnosing it as MRSA. I was in the hospital for 8 days, but always wondered if my recovery would have been better if they had diagnosed and treated me quicker.
COMMENT 316728P	2012-09-06 08:08 AM
To help eliminate antibiotic-resistent infections we need to take antibiotics out of the food chain. This is one reason why I buy organic food whenever it is available.
COMMENT 316742	2012-09-06 08:26 AM
My brother developed sepsis after shoulder surgery at Cottage (downtown) a few years ago . Nearly died. H e has more surgery tomorrow to fix what they did and didn't do at that time, in Thousand Oaks.
SBROCKS	2012-09-06 09:13 AM
At the old building, Cottage had to close down a operating room due to so much staph infections coming out of that room. Surgery has many risks, staph is just one of them.
COMMENT 316798	2012-09-06 10:19 AM
Hospitals aren't the safest places on the Earth. Do all you can to stay out of them. Maintain proper height/weight ratio. Take a walk once in a day or roll if you are in a wheel chair already. Eat seasonal food...massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy, exercise classes, dance...go to the beach and breathe in the some fresh air. No infection here...sounds like you're going for a class action. I hope your intentions are to right the wronged and not stifle the Cottage.
LUCKY 777	2012-09-06 10:44 AM
I am going to have surgery soon, and asked a doctor friend if there was anything I could do to boost my immune system, to be able to fight off anything I might be exposed to. I am doing those supplements, but he said the single most effective thing I could do would be to have a volunteer friend come into my recovery room with gloves on and disinfectant surface wipes and go over every surface by my bed that the nurses or doctors might touch. The transfer of MRSA and clostridium difficile, and other healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and nosocomial infections, is a nightmare we are not being accurately informed of by statistics.
COMMENT 316849	2012-09-06 11:53 AM
Geeezeee.... this is very scary!!!
COMMENT 316913	2012-09-06 01:39 PM
I got a staff infection from just visiting a friend at cottage hospital after her surgery.
SPARKEY	2012-09-06 06:42 PM
I got some odd infection (no one was able to name the infection) from an IV needle while I was in the ER in Oct 2010. Upon my return to Cottage a few days later for the infection as well as being released too early the first time, I spent a week there and received a staph infection among other things. What a joy to be in the hospital. It could have been much worse.
SPARKEY	2012-09-06 06:46 PM
I had an attorney to look into the cause of my infections and I would have had a lawsuit had my infectious disease doctor simply stated in his report that my infections were a direct effect of a needle in the ER and another while I was on the 5th floor. Because that statement wasn't there, anywhere, I was screwed.
COMMENT 317113P	2012-09-06 10:12 PM
My good friend died at Cottage 6 months ago, after a botched heart valve transplant, and then MRSA finished him off. We call it "killer cottage" because of this episode and 2 others in the very recent past. if you're really sick go to LA

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