Hospital-acquired infections are a significant cause of complications and death during a patient’s stay. These are the kind of infections that hospitals acquire not because of their underlying disease or condition, but rather because they are in a hospital. In no other hospital unit are infections a bigger problem than they are in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where patients are severely ill and their immunity is compromised.

Different types of ICU-acquired infections include ventilator-associated pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and urinary tract infections. For example, ventilator-associated pneumonia is due to the patient being on a mechanical ventilator through a tube.

A new study published in this month’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association examined the infection status of more than 14,000 patients from 1,265 ICUs in 75 countries on a single day (May 8th, 2007). More than half of these patients (51%) had an infection.

The longer a patient had been in the ICU prior to that day, the more likely they were to have an infection. More specifically, the mortality rate was 32% for patients who had been in the ICU for a day or less at the time of the study and 70% for those who had been there for more than a week.

One of the most noteworthy findings in the study was that infected patients were twice more likely to die at the ICU than those that were not infected, which points to the seriousness of the problem. Overall, ICU mortality rate of infected patients was 25%, whereas for those that are not infected it was only 11%. Similarly, the hospital mortality rate of these infected patients was 33% vs. 15% for those that were not infected.

These results suggest that ICU infections are common across all units in all countries, and that infections are highly associated with death rates in the ICU. The majority of these infections can be significantly reduced through small simple steps that healthcare providers can take. For example, the evidence suggests that ventilator-associated pneumonia can be prevented if doctors and nurses wash their hands regularly before and after seeing a patient, and if the patient head is kept elevated while the patient is on the ventilator.