The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) have released two reports – one, a New England Journal of Medicine” article detailing 2011 national healthcare-associated infection estimates from a survey of hospitals in ten states, and the other a 2012 annual report on national and state-specific progress toward U.S. Health and Human Services HAI prevention goals. Together, the reports show that progress has been made in the effort to eliminate infections that commonly threaten hospital patients, but more work is needed to improve patient safety.
The CDC Multistate Point-Prevalence Survey of Health Care-Associated Infections, published in NEJM, used 2011 data from 183 U.S. hospitals to estimate the burden of a wide range of infections in hospital patients. That year, about 721,800 infections occurred in 648,000 hospital patients. About 75,000 patients with healthcare-associated infections died during their hospitalizations. The most common healthcare-associated infections were pneumonia (22 percent), surgical site infections (22 percent), gastrointestinal infections (17 percent), urinary tract infections (13 percent), and bloodstream infections (10 percent).
The second report, CDC’s National and State Healthcare-associated Infection Progress Report, includes a subset of infection types that are commonly required to be reported to CDC. On the national level, the report found a:
* 44 percent decrease in central line-associated bloodstream infections between 2008 and 2012
* 20 percent decrease in infections related to the 10 surgical procedures tracked in the report between 2008 and 2012
* four percent decrease in hospital-onset MRSA between 2011 and 2012
* two percent decrease in hospital-onset C. difficile infections between 2011 and 2012
To access both reports and to see the updated healthcare-associated infection data, see CDC’s website: www.cdc.gov/hai.