FOUR
Hospital Infections
Acting into a New Way of Thinking
In 2006, the Veterans Administration hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, having exhausted all other methods to curtail the transmission rates of MRSA (an extremely dangerous hospital-cultivated bacteria), turned to the positive deviance approach. Jerry found himself at the frontier in applying PD in the most organizationally complex setting in which the approach had ever been undertaken. His account captures events as they unfolded and the adaptations necessary to tailor PD to this unique environment. 1
IN 1847, DR. IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS, a Hungarian physician working in a hospital in Vienna, discovered a staggering discrepancy between maternal mortality rates in two wards of the ...
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