A recent report has revealed that many NHS Trusts are unaware of the full scale, cost and impact of healthcare-acquired infections such as sepsis and norovirus. The Clinical Services Journal reports.
According to the report from the Medical Technology Group, around 58% of NHS Trusts, that responded to a Freedom of Information request, fail to collate the total number of cases of five common infections, while around 74% keep no records at all of the number of healthcare- associated infection (HCAI) associated deaths.
A total of 88% of Trusts were unaware of the financial burden or operational impact of HCAIs and only one Trust said that it measured the total number of extra nights that patients stay in hospital due to infections acquired in the course of their treatment.
The report, entitled Infection Prevention and Control: Combatting a problem that has not gone away shows that, despite MRSA and E. coli rates having fallen dramatically in the last decade, there remains a danger of complacency about rates of other HCAIs to which the same attention is not being paid and there has been a failure to apply the successes of mandatory reporting to these other infections.
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