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CDC Finds Surveillance Data Lowers Nosocomial Rates.

Critical Care Alert

| September 01, 2001 | COPYRIGHT 2001 A Thomson Healthcare Company. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

ONCE HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS UNDERSTAND the significance of nosocomial infections, they will alter their care giving practices to bring reductions, according to a recent evaluation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance system (NNIS).

But even though improving caregiver practices clearly improves patient care, it will hardly solve the problem. The best current estimates are that only about a third of nosocomial infections are preventable. Overall, nosocomials cause 44,000-98,000 deaths and cost $17-29 billion per year when calculated with other medical errors.

To lower these figures, the CDC recommends establishing a multicenter monitoring system that uses standard definitions, data fields, protocols, and names an aggregating institution to standardize definitions and protocols, receive and assess data, and standardize the approach to risk-adjusting the benchmarks.

NNIS has been monitoring ICU patients since 1987, using site-specific, risk-adjusted infection rates by ICU type. CDC researchers found that from 1990 through 1999, participating NNIS hospitals decreased risk adjusted patient respiratory, urinary, and bloodstream infection rates. Substantial decreases in bloodstream infection rates occurred in medical (44%), surgical (31%), and pediatric (32%) ICUs.

The NNIS system uses the endemic-disease rate of nosocomial infection as a measure of ongoing infection risks to hospitalized patients when no recognized outbreaks are in process. However, researchers point out that no single source of information allows for accurately identifying nosocomial infections.

Researchers found that once patient-care personnel saw value in the data collected, they altered behaviors in ways that may have reduced the incidence of nosocomial infections in NNIS hospitals. In fact, the key to NNIS's success is the willingness of infection-control practitioners to develop preventive measures using the monitoring data. Developing better measures for preventable nosocomials should help ...

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