WASHINGTON, D.C. – Five major health care organizations last week came together to issue a set of guidelines and strategies to help prevent six potentially lethal hospital-associated infections, aiming to help hospitals nationwide adopt proven, effective safety practices.
The guidelines, endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, address central line-associated bloodstream infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, surgical site infections, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and the intestinal bacteria Clostridium difficile.
Hospitals across the country have been working for years to reduce these infections, all of which have been shown to be preventable, in almost all cases, by implementing specific protocols or even simple measures like putting hand sanitizers outside all patient rooms.
Locally, the Rhode Island Intensive Care Unit Collaborative, which includes teams from all the adult ICUs in the state, has been working on many of those same issues, leading to substantial reductions in pneumonia and bloodstream infections already.
The new guidelines were produced by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in partnership with the American Hospital Association, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology and The Joint Commission, which accredits more than 15,000 U.S. health care organizations.
In addition, 29 other health care organizations have provided their endorsements.
The guidelines do not break new ground, but rather pull together the best and latest research on how to prevent these types of infections, and they will be updated as science evolves. Some may also be added to the Joint Commission’s accrediting standards in the coming years.
The CDC estimates that 2 million Americans contract an infection while receiving medical treatment and more than 90,000 will die from related complications each year. Hospital infections add an estimated $4.5 billion to $6.5 billion to the nation’s annual health care costs.
“People should expect health care that is safe and free from additional complications,” said Dr. P.J. Brennan, head of the federal Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee and president of SHEA, in a news release.
“This effort will benefit health care providers, patients and their families, and just about everyone who walks in the hospital door,” he added, “because the strategies announced today identify what hospitals should be doing based on the latest scientific evidence and also provide performance measures to ensure accountability.”
Dr. David Classen, of the IDSA, a co-author of the guidelines, said the goal of the publication was not just to pull together the best information, but to “create recommendations that are understandable [and] easy to use and stress accountability.”
The recommendations are prioritized, with two categories: minimum basic practices that should be adopted by all acute-care hospitals, and special approaches for use in locations and/or populations within the hospitals when infections are not controlled using basic practices.
The five organizations that sponsored the project said they were driven by growing patient concerns about hospital-associated infections and by an increasing sense of urgency. There is also a financial reason for hospitals to adopt these practices: As of Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will no longer reimburse hospitals for costs related to treating certain hospital-associated infections.
The guidelines, “A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals,” can be viewed here and will be published subsequently as a supplement to SHEA’s journal Infection Control and Healthcare Epidemiology. Additional information about the compendium can be found at www.preventingHAIs.com.
