Document Type
Article
Original Publication Date
2012
Journal/Book/Conference Title
BMC Infectious Diseases
Volume
2012
DOI of Original Publication
10.1186/1471-2334-12-234
Date of Submission
September 2014
Abstract
Background Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is a common infection in the intensive care unit (ICU) and associated with a high mortality.
Methods A quasi-experimental study was conducted in a medical-surgical ICU. Multiple interventions to optimize VAP prevention were performed from October 2008 to December 2010. All of these processes, including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) ventilator bundle plus oral decontamination with chlorhexidine and continuous aspiration of subglottic secretions (CASS), were adopted for patients undergoing mechanical ventilation.
Results We evaluated a total of 21,984 patient-days, and a total of 6,052 ventilator-days (ventilator utilization rate of 0.27). We found VAP rates of 1.3 and 2.0 per 1,000 ventilator days respectively in 2009 and 2010, achieving zero incidence of VAP several times during 12 months, whenever VAP bundle compliance was over 90%.
Conclusion These results suggest that it is possible to reduce VAP rates to near zero and sustain these rates, but it requires a complex process involving multiple performance measures and interventions that must be permanently monitored.
Rights
© 2012 Caserta et al.; licensee 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.
Is Part Of
VCU Internal Medicine Publications
Comments
Originallyt published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-12-234