Infection Control Procedures to Prevent Transmission of Clostridium Difficile

Abstract

Introduction: Nosocomial infections, also known as healthcare-associated infections, are a significant public health concern. According to recent data, C. diff infections are one of the most common healthcare-associated infections, with an estimated 500,000 cases occurring in the United States each year. The purposes of this review are to highlight the recent epidemiological data and to provide an overview of infection control procedures to prevent transmission of clostridium difficile in hospitals and tertiary care settings.
Methods: We systematically searched for controlled trials of interventions to reduce the rate of clostridium difficile in acute-care hospitals, using the biomedical electronic databases Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and the ISI Web of Knowledge. We included studies that assessed the effect of interventions on the rate of clostridium difficile in acute-care hospitals. Secondary studies, such as meta-analyses, were excluded. All titles and abstracts were independently screened by 2 reviewers to identify studies potentially eligible for inclusion and a full-text review was performed to identify studies eligible for data extraction.

Results: Epidemiological studies show that MRSA, vancomycin-resistant enterococci and C. difficile are on the rise worldwide and that they have the potential to become important pathogens and endemic in North America. The emergence of community-acquired MRSA and the increasing number of hospital-acquired MRSA infections. Outbreak Reports and Intervention Studies of Nosocomial Infection (ORION) guidelines were published to raise the standards of research and publication of hospital epidemiology in order to facilitate the synthesis of evidence and to promote reporting transparency.
Conclusions: With regard to these issues, clinicians should be guided by their local infection prevention and control policies and procedures. The use of a bundled approach to prevent infections based on local surveillance data for clostridium difficile of a given institution has been shown to work. The implications of the increased infection severity of disease and the successful management mandate the combined expertise of intensivists, surgeons, infectious disease physicians, pharmacists, infection prevention and control personnel, and the laboratorian.