Erschienen in:
01.06.2008 | Êditorial
On the way towards eradication of catheter-related infections!
verfasst von:
Philippe Eggimann, Giorgio Zanetti
Erschienen in:
Intensive Care Medicine
|
Ausgabe 6/2008
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Excerpt
The management of critically ill patients is virtually impossible without intravascular access devices, and about half of those used in intensive care units (ICUs) are central venous catheters (CVCs). Unfortunately, these devices are risk factors for bloodstream and other catheter-related infections [
1,
2], the rates of which are used as markers for the quality of hospital care over time [
3]. Most of these infections are indeed preventable and have progressively decreased over the past decade in the USA, from a pooled mean of 5.0 per 1,000 catheter-days for the 1992–2004 period to 2.9 in 2006 [
4]. This may largely be due to education-based multimodal interventions, which were incorporated as a key recommendation in the prevention guidelines [
5,
6]. Recent experience confirms the positive impact of such an approach and strongly suggests that the objective should now be to eradicate CVC-related infections [
7,
8]. …
