Major ArticleInfection control practices related to Clostridium difficile infection in acute care hospitals in Canada
Section snippets
Methods
CNISP is a collaborative effort of the Canadian Hospital Epidemiology Committee, a subcommittee of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada and the Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). At the time of this survey, 41 sentinel hospitals from 9 provinces were participating in CNISP. All CNISP hospitals have a university affiliation and provide primary, secondary, and tertiary care to adult and/or pediatric
Results
A total of 34 acute care hospitals participated in the 6-month prospective surveillance for CDI. Of these, 33 completed the infection prevention and control practices survey. Of these hospitals, 19 (58%) were combined adult/pediatric hospitals, 10 (30%) were adult- only hospitals, and 4 (12%) were pediatric hospitals. The average size of the participating hospitals was 426 ± 267 beds (range, 76 to 1169 beds). Twenty-six hospitals (79%) had an infection control program in place with at least 1
Discussion
This report presents the findings of the first survey of infection prevention and control practices and laboratory methods used by Canadian acute care hospitals to control CDI. Although contact precautions were used quite uniformly in the 33 hospitals participating in the study, considerable variation was found in terms of testing strategies, cleaning and disinfection protocols and products, and isolation practices, even though a standardized case definition for CDI was used by all
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Conflicts of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.