An Analysis of Interventions Aimed at Decreasing Hospital-Associated Clostridium Difficile Cases in Community Hospital A

Interventions aimed at reducing the number of hospital acquired infections of Clostridium difficile are important tools to reduce the mortality and morbidity connected with the infection. The public health significance of C. difficile is the fact that C. difficile has contributed to approximately 14,000 deaths per year. To limit the negative impact of C. difficile in hospital settings, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend several interventions that can be implemented to try and reduce the spread of C. difficile between patients. Examples of these interventions include the isolation of patients in private rooms, the use of gloves and gowns by all staff and visitors when entering a patient's room, the use of soap and water before and after entering all patient rooms, environmental cleaning of patient rooms, and judicious use of antibiotics. By reducing C. difficile infections, the negative outcomes to the patients can be reduced along with the extra cost to the healthcare system due to the infections. This paper describes and analyzes the number of positive C. difficile tests before (FY07 to FY09) and after (FY10 to FY12) implementation of two specific interventions in Community Hospital A located in Allegheny County which were referred to as the antimicrobial stewardship program and the cleaning room protocol. These data on C. difficile tests and aggregate measures of patient-associated data, which included average age and length of stay, were collected from the archived annual reports and contain information from July 2006 to June 2012 or Fiscal Year 07 to Fiscal Year 12 (FY07 to FY 12). These data were from a specific community hospital located in Allegheny County. This community hospital was referred to as Community Hospital A for the purpose of this paper. The evaluation of the data revealed that there was a significant decrease in the number of healthcare-associated Clostridium difficile infections