- Oral presentation
- Open Access
- Published:
Frequency of nosocomial influenza cases in a tertiary hospital during the 2012-13 to 2014-15 seasons
Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control volume 4, Article number: O59 (2015)
Introduction
Control of influenza in the hospital must be a priority within the programs to improve patient safety.
Objectives
The objective is to determine the frequency and characteristics of nosocomial influenza cases in a tertiary hospital in the last three seasons.
Methods
We included all the patients hospitalized with suspected influenza during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 complete seasons; for the 2014-15, patients were included until week 10-2015. Cases were patients with influenza-like illness who were microbiologically confirmed (nasopharyngeal swabs or PCR positive for influenza virus A/B). Study variables were: type of infection (nosocomial -the onset of symptoms was 72 hours or more after the admission of the patient- / community-acquired), type of case (serious / not serious), death (yes / no). To study the association between seasons, chi-square test was used.
Results
Among the confirmed influenza cases, the frequency of nosocomial cases was 14.2% (18/127) in the 2012-13 season, 11.6% (26/224) in the 2013-14 season and 14.1% (32/226) in the 2014-15 season; p = 0.672. The frequency of nosocomial cases among severe cases was: 7.5% (3/40) in the 2012-13 season, 6.1% (4/66) in the 2013-14 season and 8.9 (4/45) in the 2014-15 season; p = 0.904. The frequency of exitus in nosocomial cases was: 40% (2/5) in the 2012-13 season, 0% (0/11) in the 2013-14 season and 8.3% (1/12) in the 2014-15 season; p = 0.05.
Conclusion
This study highlights the impact of nosocomial transmission of influenza within a tertiary hospital. The annual influenza vaccination of health professionals, together with recommendations on respiratory hygiene and an appropriate degree of compliance with droplet recommendations in the flu cases are the main strategies for the prevention of nosocomial influenza and therefore for the improvement of patient safety.
Disclosure of interest
None declared.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
García, J.M., Muriel, J.M., Iglesias, I.T. et al. Frequency of nosocomial influenza cases in a tertiary hospital during the 2012-13 to 2014-15 seasons. Antimicrob Resist Infect Control 4 (Suppl 1), O59 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/2047-2994-4-S1-O59
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/2047-2994-4-S1-O59
Keywords
- Influenza
- Influenza Virus
- Patient Safety
- Influenza Vaccination
- Tertiary Hospital