ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Research Article | Open Access

T. Jayasree and Mustafa Afzal

Department of Microbiology, CARE Hospitals, Exhibition Grounds Road, Nampally, Hyderabad, Telangana – 500 001, India.
J Pure Appl Microbiol, 2019, 13 (1): 591-597 | Article Number: 5227
Received:10/07/2018| Accepted: 31/10/2018 | Published: 14/03/2019
Abstract

Hospital-acquired infections affect millions of patients worldwide each year and result in massive preventable healthcare costs. Many of the organisms that cause these infections survive on routine healthcare equipment and are easily transmitted from patient to patient when healthcare professionals and facilities do not comply with infection prevention and control practices. They are particularly dangerous for high-risk patients and patients in intensive care units. Hence the present study involved the implementation of an infection control protocol to reduce these nosocomial infections. Guidelines for infection control in our hospital setting were formulated by the infection control team in the year 2010. These guidelines were periodically revised to improve the compliance of infection control measures. Additionally, regular auditing of the prescribed antibiotic further minimized the high end and reserved antibiotic use thereby further reducing the nosocomial infection rate. Data regarding the infection rates were collected from the intensive care units and were calculated for the site-specific nosocomial infection. It is observed that 17.6% reduction in the nosocomial infection rate was over a period of 7 years. Additional analysis of the site-specific nosocomial infection rate revealed a 5.2, 12.2, 10.5, and 5.7% reduction in ventilator-associated pneumonia, catheter-related urinary tract, bloodstream, and surgical site infection rate. The results of the present study showed an improved compliance rate with the infection control guidelines which facilitated the control of nosocomial infection rates thereby reducing the hospital costs, total patient days and the mortality rate.

Keywords

Infection control; Acquired infections; Hospital; Nosocomial infection; Bacterial pathogens.

Article Metrics

Article View: 10899

Share This Article

© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, 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.