Leaders at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) support a national project, the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP), to decrease catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) developed in U.S. hospitals.
A recent study, available in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that there are approximately 250,000 CAUTIs developed in hospitals each year. This amounts to $250 million in expenses.
“AHRQ’s research shows that we can make significant progress in advancing patient safety and reducing costs in health care,” AHRQ Director Andry Bindman said. “Tools such as CUSP are an important part of our efforts to improve the way we deliver care, helping frontline clinicians make care safer, less expensive and better for public health.”
CAUTIs are one of the most common infections developed in health care facilities. They are mostly preventable: stopping these infections can save a variety of other health complications, like blood stream infections and antibiotic use, which reduces the risk of creating more antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
“These results demonstrate that a collaborative effort focusing on both technical and socio-adaptive interventions can reduce CAUTI rates in non-ICU settings,” Sanjay Saint, chief of medicine at the VA Ann Arbor (MI) Healthcare System, said. “Importantly, we learned how to scale up the intervention when going from a single hospital and region to a broader group encompassing about 10 percent of all U.S. hospitals. The overall experience in this project should help us implement methods to reduce CAUTI in other settings such as long-term care.”
