Central Line Infections, both better and worse

Here are our latest figures for central line infections, measured in cases per thousand ICU patient days. The average over the last several months remains better than for the previous year, but the rate for February comes from two actual cases, worse than January and with 100 fewer patient days. As always, we treat them as sentinel events and try to learn what went wrong and why.

Our folks are really serious about this and, in my opinion, deserve a lot of credit. A friend of mine was recently in the hospital and had one of these lines put in his chest for delivery of an anti-cancer drug. His wife, a medical professional, watched the doctor and nurse insert the line and was very impressed with their understanding of, and rigorous application of, the protocol. (And no, my friends did not mention to their providers that they had read all about this in my blog.)

Month ----- Infection Rate
Oct 05 ----- 1.67
Nov 05 ----- 1.28
Dec 05 ----- 2.43
Jan 06 ----- 3.07
Feb 06 ----- 1.40
Mar 06 ----- 1.07
Apr 06 ----- 0.00
May 06 ----- 0.59
Jun 06 ----- 1.15
Jul 06 ----- 0.57
Aug 06 ----- 3.03
Sep 06 ----- 2.50
Oct 06 ----- 0.00
Nov 06 ----- 2.38
Dec 06 ----- 1.87
Jan 07 ----- 0.00
Feb 07 ----- 1.15