Chicago ? A new federal study finds many same-day surgery centers — where patients get such things as foot operations and pain injections — have serious problems with infection control.

Failure to wash hands, wear gloves and clean blood glucose meters were among the reported breaches. Clinics reused devices meant for one person or dipped into single-dose medicine vials for multiple patients.

The findings, appearing in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest lax infection practices may pervade the nation’s more than 5,000 outpatient centers, experts said.

“These are basic fundamentals of infection control, things like cleaning your hands, cleaning surfaces in patient care areas,” said lead author Dr. Melissa Schaefer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s all surprising and somewhat disappointing.”

The study was prompted by a hepatitis C outbreak in Las Vegas believed to be caused by unsafe injection practices at two now-closed clinics.

It’s the first report from a push to more vigorously inspect U.S. outpatient centers, a growing segment of the health care system that annually performs more than 6 million procedures and collects $3 billion from Medicare. Procedures performed at such centers include exams of the esophagus, colonoscopies and plastic surgery.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement that her department is expanding its hospital infection control action plan to include ambulatory surgical centers and dialysis centers.