- Title
- The prevalence of healthcare associated infections among adult inpatients at nineteen large Australian acute-care public hospitals: a point prevalence survey
- Creator
- Russo, Philip L.; Stewardson, Andrew J.; Cheng, Allen C.; Bucknall, Tracey; Mitchell, Brett G.
- Relation
- Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control Vol. 8, no. 114
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13756-019-0570-y
- Publisher
- BioMed Central (BMC)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Background: Australia does not have a national healthcare associated infection (HAI) surveillance program. Only one HAI point prevalence study has been undertaken in 1984. The objective of this study was to estimate the burden of healthcare associated infection (HAI) in acute adult inpatients in Australia. Methods: A cross sectional point prevalence study (PPS) was conducted in a sample of large acute care hospitals. All data were collected by two trained Research Assistants. Surveillance methodology was based on the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) PPS Protocol with variation in the sampling method in that only acute inpatients ≥ 18 years old were included. ECDC HAI definitions were applied. Results: Data was collected between August and November 2018. A total of 2767 patients from 19 hospitals were included in the study. The median age of patients was 67, and 52.9% of the sample were male. Presence of a multi-drug resistant organism was documented for 10.3% of the patients. There were 363 HAIs present in 273 patients. The prevalence of patients with a HAI was 9.9% (95%CI: 8.8–11.0). Hospital prevalence rates ranged from 5.7% (95%CI:2.9–11.0) to 17.0% (95%CI:10.7–26.1). The most common HAIs were surgical site infection, pneumonia and urinary tract infection, comprising 64% of all HAIs identified. Conclusion: This is the first HAI PPS to be conducted in Australia in 34 years. The prevalence rate is higher than the previous Australian study and that reported by the ECDC, however differences in methodology limit comparison. Regular, large scale HAI PPS should be undertaken to generate national HAI data to inform and drive national interventions.
- Subject
- healthcare associated infection; infection prevention; surveillance; point prevalence study; SDG 3; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1455086
- Identifier
- uon:45042
- Identifier
- ISSN:2047-2994
- Rights
- © Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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