Hospital Infection Control Still Not Good Enough

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

A CDC report shows hospitals are falling short on infection prevention goals.

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Although hospitals have shown significant gains in the battle against hospital-acquired infections over the past several years, they still are falling short of targets set by the Obama Administration. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report, there has been a 46 percent decrease in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) between 2008 and 2013. However, the CDC asserts additional efforts are necessary in order to improve overall patient safety, according to a press release.

“Hospitals have made real progress to reduce some types of healthcare-associated infections – it can be done,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “The key is for every hospital to have rigorous infection control programs to protect patients and healthcare workers, and for health care facilities and others to work together to reduce the many types of infections that haven’t decreased enough.”

Among the national findings of the new report:

• a 46 percent decrease in CLABSI between 2008 and 2013
• a 19 percent decrease in (SSI) related to the 10 select procedures tracked in the report between 2008 and 2013
• a 6 percent increase in CAUTI since 2009
• an 8 percent decrease in MRSA bloodstream infections between 2011 and 2013

Despite these gains the study’s authors found serious room for improvement. For example, the number of catheter-associated urinary tract infections between 2009 and 2013 actually increased 6 percent. And, while 26 states performed better than the national average on at least two of the six infection types tracked, 19 states performed worse on at least two infection types and eight states performed worse on at least three infections.

Overall, hospitals failed to reach targets that HHS laid out in 2009 in the National Action Plan to Prevent Health Care-Associated Infections: Road Map to Elimination, which called for a 50 percent reduction in central-line blood infections by 2013, a 30 percent reduction in MRSA infections, and a 25 percent decline in catheter-associated, surgical wound, and C. difficile infections.

Research demonstrates awareness of infection control problems and proactive steps to prevent them can help healthcare facilities, care teams, and individual doctors and nurses decrease rates of targeted HAIs by more than 70 percent.

“Healthcare-associated infection data give healthcare facilities and public health agencies knowledge to design, implement and evaluate HAI prevention efforts,” Patrick Conway, Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality and Chief Medical Officer of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said in the release. “Medicare’s quality measurement reporting requires hospitals to share this information with the CDC, demonstrating that, together, we can dramatically improve the safety and quality of care for patients.”

Ultimately, the report concluded, “More action is needed at every level of public health and healthcare to improve patient safety and eliminate infections that commonly threaten hospital patients. Full engagement between local, state, and federal public health agencies and their partners will be vial to sustaining and extending HAI surveillance and prevention progress.”