PHOENIX – If you happen to believe that the impact of health care–acquired infections is insignificant, think again. According to Dr. Kevin W. Lobdell, health care–acquired infections (HAIs) cause more deaths each year in the United States than breast cancer, lung cancer, and AIDS combined.
“If you look at hospitalized patients, one in five will acquire a health care–acquired infection,” Dr. Lobdell of the Sanger Heart and Vascular Institute at Carolinas Health System, Charlotte, N.C., said in a video interview at the annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. “With respect to length of stay, that goes from 5 days on average for a normal, uninfected patient, to 22 days if they’ve had an infection. The mortality rate can be as high as 6% in those people that have developed infections, so that in itself is an enormous burden.”
He went on to discuss the most common HAIs in the hospital setting and noted that combating them involves strategies that consider people, the environment, and technology. He predicted that in coming years clinicians will have a better “analytic capability to understand what we’ve done in the past and what correlates with success in the future, and then be able to implement and learn from that.”
Dr. Lobdell reported having no financial disclosures.