CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Any new rooms added to the nation's 6,000 hospitals will most likely need to be private ones to comply with new guidelines for most U.S. states, industry experts say.
A growing body of evidence shows that keeping patients in single rooms pays for itself by reducing infection rates and recovery time and making patient care more efficient, according to the guidelines issued this month by the Facility Guidelines Institute, an independent group that advises the government.
The latest guidelines, which apply to new hospital construction only, follow several high-profile reports on the role of medication errors and hospital-acquired infections in patient deaths.
"I believe the safety issues have become paramount," said Scot Latimer, a health-care architect and member of the American Institute of Architects, which published the guidelines in a joint effort with the FGI.
Forty-two U.S. states adopted the latest version of the guidelines and use them in some form to grant accreditation and certification to hospitals.
The FGI, which includes government officials, doctors and hospitals, updates its recommendations every four years. The guidelines only affect medical and surgical units, not specialty units like pediatric and psychiatric wards.
A panel appointed by the FGI reviewed more than 200 articles to study the proposal's potential impact on costs, infection rates and the sociological impact on patient behavior.
"They can ameliorate the risk of infection and certainly eliminates a significant portion of medical errors," said Enrique Unanue, deputy director of health-care regulation at the Illinois Department of Public Health, who was involved in drafting the guidelines. "Everyone felt now is the time to recognize the clinical benefit."
Infections acquired during the course of medical treatment in the United States account for about 90,000 deaths and $4.5 billion in excess costs annually, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And an influential report by the Institute of Medicine, a government advisory body, in 1999 found that medical errors in hospitals may account for as many as 98,000 deaths a year.
The American Hospital Association, the trade group for most U.S. hospitals, stressed that exemptions can be made to the rules. For example, a hospital in an urban area with prohibitively high costs or a rural hospital with lack of access to funding may request exemptions.
Dale Woodin, deputy executive director of the AHA's health-care engineering division, said it is important for hospital administrators to retain control over how hospitals are built.
"As I understand it, there is a caveat for local jurisdictions to re-look at the whole issue," Woodin said.
Still, individual hospitals will have to make the case for exceptions in the states that decide to use them. Florida has already said it will use them, and several states automatically roll over into the new rules.
"It is the standard for health-care design in the country," Illinois health official Unanue said.