UAE hospital infections cut by more than a third

Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators were involved in the effort, which reduced by more than one third central-line associated bloodstream infections in the emirate’s intensive care units.

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ABU DHABI // Hospitals have cut by more than a third the number of potentially fatal infections among intensive-care patients.

Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators have taken part in a collaboration to reduce infections caused by catheters, which are inserted into major veins and can be left in for months.

Staff from 18 Abu Dhabi ICUs have worked with specialists from Johns Hopkins Medicine of the US, which runs hospitals and a world-famous medical school. Across those units, the catheter infection rate dropped by 38 per cent.

“We’re very pleased. It helped to show that things are not as different as some might like to believe,” said Dr Asad Latif, an assistant professor of critical care at Johns Hopkins.

“This was proof of concept to show not only could you reduce harm, but the difference in culture can be overcome by a collaborative approach.”

Web tutorials and other training took place between 2012 and last year, and Johns Hopkins specialists made visits to Abu Dhabi in conjunction with the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, or Seha.

Measures taught included proper hand hygiene, inserting catheters into the neck or chest rather than the groin, and ensuring that all equipment was stored in the one place.

The programme aimed to introduce methods that could also be used on other kinds of infection, and give UAE medical staff the opportunity to become regional leaders and teachers in preventing infection.

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Infection prevention integral to management of UAE healthcare

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“We helped teach them but it was local teams that implemented them, with the hope they would become local leaders and help develop local interventions, and move on to other things of local interest,” said Dr Latif, who is associated with Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Armstrong Institute.

He said it was important to include administrators, because doctors and nurses often knew what procedures to follow but the realities of hospital work could make it hard for them to stick to best practices.

But Dr Latif said that sometimes in hospitals elsewhere, medical staff had to collect supplies from different parts of the hospital before they could carry out procedures, often in emergency situations.

“The problem often ends up being the ability to do it and doing it every time,” he said.

Johns Hopkins has led similar training in the UK and Spain.

But Dr Latif said this was the first time the procedures had been tested across several centres in a non-western country.

He said it was not clear before the project that an approach that had proved effective in the US or UK would work in Abu Dhabi.

“The working environment is different in the Middle East – the hierarchical structure is different – so the need for administrator involvement was much more,” he said.

The results of the project, which involved 10 adult, five neonatal and three paediatric ICUs, were published recently in the scientific journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

Seha was unavailable for comment.

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