Can inpatient hospital experiences predict central line-associated bloodstream infections

Background: Factors that increase the risk of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) are not fully understood. Recently, Hospital Compare began compiling data from hospital-required reporting to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network on CLABSIs in intensive care units (ICUs), at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals in the United States, and made this data accessible on a central website. Also available on the same website are results from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey of patients ’ hospital experiences. Utilizing both databases, our objective was to determine whether patients ’ hospital experiences were significantly associated with increased risk for reported ICU CLABSI. Methods and Findings: We conducted a zero-inflated Poisson regression analysis at the hospital level on CLABSI-observed cases by ICUs in acute care hospitals (n = 1987) in the United States between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2011. During this period there were a total of 10,866 CLABSI cases and 9,543,765 central line days. In our final model, the percent of patients who reported that they ‘‘sometimes’ ’ or ‘‘never’ ’ received help as soon as they wanted was significantly associated with an increased risk for CLABSIs. Conclusions: Using national datasets, we found that inpatients ’ hospital experiences were significantly associated with an increased risk of ICU reported CLABSIs. This study suggests that hospitals with lower staff responsiveness, perhaps becaus