The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) 2018 National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) Progress Report provides the latest summary of select HAIs across four healthcare settings; acute care hospitals (ACHs), critical access hospitals (CAHs), inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs) and long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs).
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) designates CAHs as hospitals that have 25 or fewer acute care inpatient beds and that maintain an annual average length of stay of 96 hours or less for acute care patients. IRFs include hospitals, or part of a hospital, that provide intensive rehabilitation services using an interdisciplinary team approach. LTACHs provide treatment for patients who are generally very sick and stay, on average, more than 25 days.
The report provides data on central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), ventilator-associated events (VAEs), surgical site infections (SSIs), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bloodstream events, and Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) events, formerly known as Clostridium difficile.
The report’s national factsheets, as well as the detailed technical tables, include infection-specific standardized infection ratios (SIRs), which measure progress in reducing HAIs compared to the 2015 baseline time period. The SIR is the ratio of the observed number of infections (events) to the number of predicted infections (events) for a summarized time period.
