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O026: Countrywide prevalence study of healthcare-associated infections in brazilian hospitals: preliminary results

Introduction

The knowledge of burden of Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) in hospitals is essential to drive governmental strategies for its prevention and control.

Objectives

To identify the prevalence of HAI in a representative sample of Brazilian hospitals.

Methods

A team of trained nurses carried out a hospital-wide HAI point prevalence survey in 2012. A sample of hospitals from five Brazilian regions was evaluated (n=91; total of 8,853 beds).

Results

The overall infection rate was 11.1%, varying from 2.5% (hospitals with <50 beds) to 18.3% (hospitals with > 200 beds). Reference hospitals showed 11.2% of overall infection rate. The most prevalent infections were pneumonia (3.6%), bloodstream infection (3.5%), surgical site infection (1.4%), urinary tract infection (1.1%) and skin infection (0.4%). Hospitals with >200 beds were likely to have higher HAI rates (RR=1.71; IC=1.398-2.10; P<0.001). The risk factors more frequently identified were: central venous catheter (17.8%), surgery (15.5%), urinary catheter (14.0%), and mechanical ventilators (8.1%). Etiologic agents were identified only in 9.1% (43/473) of infections. Gram-negative organisms were more frequent (56.0%), among them, Klebsiella spp (19.0%) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (16%) and were predominant. Among Gram-positives (35.0%), coagulase-negative Staphylococci were more prevalent (16%) than Staphylococcus aureus (9.0%) or Enteroccoccus spp (6%). Yeasts were identified in 9.0% of HAI.

Conclusion

These preliminary results emphasize both the relevance and the heterogeneity of HAI in Brazilian hospitals.

Disclosure of interest

None declared.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Fortaleza, C., Padoveze, M., Kiffer, C. et al. O026: Countrywide prevalence study of healthcare-associated infections in brazilian hospitals: preliminary results. Antimicrob Resist Infect Control 2 (Suppl 1), O26 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/2047-2994-2-S1-O26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/2047-2994-2-S1-O26

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