INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to elucidate the impact of intensive care unit (ICU)-acquired infection on hospital mortality. METHODS Patients with a longer than 48 hour stay in a mixed 10 bed ICU in a tertiary-level teaching hospital were prospectively enrolled between May 2002 and June 2003. Risk factors for hospital mortality were analyzed with a logistic regression model. RESULT...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

BACKGROUND Nosocomial or hospital acquired infection has been recognized as a serious public health problem in the last twenty years. In most hospitals in Africa-South of the Sahara, although the types of community acquired infections are known, neither the magnitude, nor the common types of nosocomial infections has been documented. OBJECTIVE This study was carried out to find the prevalence...

The economics of preventing hospital-acquired infections is most often described in general terms. The underlying concepts and mechanisms are rarely made explicit but should be understood for research and policy-making. We define the key economic concepts and specify an illustrative model that uses hypothetical data to identify how two related questions might be addressed: 1) how much should be...

Nosocomial or hospital-acquired infections (NIs) are a frequent complication in hospitalized patients. The growing availability of computerized patient records in hospitals permits automated identification and extended monitoring for signs of NIs. A fuzzy- and knowledge-based system to identify and monitor NIs at intensive care units (ICUs) according to the European Surveillance System HELICS (...

learning lab for healthcare improvement, since healthcare is the region’s largest economic sector, employing one in eight workers and conducting more than $7.2 billion in business. The region is a national healthcare microcosm, as it struggles with high healthcare costs, a malpractice crisis, increasing numbers of uninsured people, and issues of patient safety. In 1997, the Pittsburgh Regional ...

Antibiotic use is widely accepted as being responsible for the selection and maintenance of antibiotic resistance. It is less obvious, however, that it is also responsible for increasing transmissibility and pathogenicity of many multiresistant bacteria and may actually be increasing the number of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Antibiotic stewardship should be given much more emphasis in ...