Celebrating the Accomplishments of our Nurses, Physicians and other Clinicians in Creating a Safer Hospital

Those of us who have been in health care for a while remember the days when we believed that infections that people acquired in the hospital were unavoidable. Because of this, we did not measure how often those in our care got a urinary tract infection because we had inserted a urinary catheter, as an example.  Now, we routinely measure hospital acquired infections (HAI’s) and we have been working hard to eliminate them.

Thanks to the outstanding collaborative improvement work of our nurses, physicians, and other clinicians, many of our units have gone months, and in some cases, years without any of the prevalent HAIs!  This accomplishment is truly a great cause for celebration because if it was your loved one, you wouldn’t want them to get an infection because they are sick and in the hospital.  The goal of coming to the hospital is to get better not to get a new problem.

Below is a list of the respective Units and their HAI Prevention Milestones:

Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infection (CLABSI):  
Without incident since 2008:  Unit 39 and Unit 54
Three-plus years without incident:  Unit 58 
Two-plus years without incident:  Unit 34, Unit 36 and Unit 59
One-plus year without incident:  Unit 38, NICU and Unit 48
Less than one-year without incident:  Unit 35 (six months), Unit 45 (seven months) and Unit 57 (10 months)

Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI):
Without incident since 2012:  Unit 39 and Unit 54
Three-plus years without incident:  Unit 36, Unit 38, Unit 45
Two-plus years without incident:  Unit 35, Unit 48 and Unit 58
One-plus year without incident:  Unit 34
Less than one-year without incident:  Unit 57 (10 months) and Unit 59 (three months)

One of the major reasons that we are much less likely to have HAI’s is because we have a 95 percent Hand Hygiene Compliance rate house-wide! Our remarkable hand hygiene rate plays an integral role in the prevention of all infections, not just CLABSIs and CAUTIs.  Maintaining the standard work of “washing in” and “washing out” is critical to our success!

Again this is great cause for celebration of the hard work of our nurses, doctors and other clinicians but especially to our nurses and nursing support technicians who maintain the catheters and lines, turn the patients to avoid bedsores and who make sure that the ventilator bundle is followed to prevent ventilator associated pneumonia.

Great job everyone and thank you!