Perhaps most terrifying is that the mere act of hospitalization will likely be the highest vector of transmission of nearly untreatable infections. Go in for a routine procedure and end up in the isolation ward due to some highly infectious, deadly disease.
This is one reason to avoid hospitals at all cost. It's also why hospitals are terrible as a first treatment option for the poor. I can't recall a family hospital trip where someone didn't catch something new at the hospital.
I think generally, everyone avoids hospitals at all costs.
The way I perceive these stories is that hospitals are actually extremely dirty on a microbial level (as is most of the world), it's just counter-intuitive because I think a lot of people take for granted that a hospital is imagined to be a super sterile place. MRSAs could potentially reside on every surface; an act as simple as touching a bed railing could get you infected. You then have patients in recovery with healing wounds/depressed immune systems, which need antibiotic treatment of some kind when they have an infection. But it's not like you cannot become infected by a MRSA outside of a hospital, you can, and the same antibiotics won't work effectively for you just as they don't work effectively in the hospital. So the first step in my mind is making sure the hospital is 'clean'.
Bacteria are just bloody durable, and people are shedding new bacteria into the environment at really absurd rates.
And the bacteria which survives all of this, i think it should look something like this:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm617979392/tt0088944?ref_=ttmi_mi...
We have robots that do that now.
http://loyolamedicine.org/newswire/news/uv-light-robots-kill...
But, of course, you can't avoid keeping a hospital sterilized.
Yes yes make everyone wear gas masks and space suits the entire time, staff and patient alike...
Yep, I have no idea how to actualy do that. There are all kinds of issues, but I'd guess that you can solve nearly all of them with tech.
I worked at a hospital for awhile, and one of the things I found interesting, though, is that the departments balance each other out. For example, our hospital did obstetrics more as a service to the community, since other hospitals were much further, but they always lost money on it. So maybe the reason we don't see surgery centers or things like that as often is that medical institutions are more stable providing a broader range of services.