PURPOSE A hospital's highest-risk patients are managed in the intensive care unit. Outcomes are determined by patients' severity of illness, existing comorbidities and by processes of care delivered. The Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) Centre for Outcome and Resource Evaluation (CORE) manages a binational clinical registry to benchmark performance, and report and asse...

BACKGROUND The lack of prospective, randomized, controlled trial data to guide optimal antibiotic use in bacteraemic critically ill patients has led to a wide variety of strategies and major issues with drug resistance. We therefore prospectively investigated the epidemiology of bacteraemia and fungaemia in intensive care units (ICUs); and the impact of timing, type and appropriateness of antib...

BACKGROUND Antibiotic resistant Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as one of the most problematic hospital acquired pathogens around the world. This study was designed to investigate the presence of antibiotic resistant A. baumannii in various hospital environments. METHODS Air, water and inanimate surface samples were taken in different wards of four hospitals and analyzed for the presence ...

We examined epidemiological aspects and bacterial resistance patterns of bacteria isolated from intensive care unit (ICU) patient samples. During a 10 month period (from June 2006 to March 2007), 812 samples of blood, urine and cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) from 553 hospitalized patients, in ICU wards, including pediatric surgical, neonatal, adult surgical I, adult surgical II, general pediatrics...

BACKGROUND Nosocomial infections constitute a global health problem, leading to a high rate of morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency and antimicrobial resistance patterns of nosocomial infections in edu-cational hospitals of Hamadan, western Iran. METHODS During a 1-year period from April 2006 to March 2007, all patients with cul-ture-proven nosocomial ...

UNLABELLED Nosocomial sinusitis is a common complication of patients in ICUs. Its diagnosis is important, and early treatment is required to avoid serious complications such as pneumonia, sepsis, meningitis, and intracranial abscesses. AIM To identify the germs causing sinusitis in ICUs by nasal swabs and maxillary sinus puncture, and to correlate these results. METHODS ICU patients with a ...

Candidaemia is increasingly important in intensive care units (ICUs). Compared with Candida albicans fungaemia, the impact of C. glabrata fungaemia on ICU patients is not well-known. The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical features, the antifungal susceptibility and the treatment outcomes of C. glabrata fungaemia in ICU patients. The medical records of ICU patients with candidaemi...

Objectives: Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter spp. which are usually resistant to many antibiotics, are the most important infectious pathogens in intensive care units (ICUs). The aim of this study was to determine the antibiotic resistance patterns of these agents and to follow variation in resistance among the years of 1999, 2006 and 2009. Methods: The resistance rates of various antibiotics for ...