Nosocomial Infections. COVID-19: A Friend or Foe?

• Autor(a) principal: Moreira,Laura Bonito
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Martins-dos-Santos,Gonçalo, Ilharco,Marta, Vieira,Marta Mello, Midões,Carolina, Rocha,Inês, Soares,Leonor, Fevereiro,Maria do Carmo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0872-671X2022000100013
• topic: COVID-19; Cross Infection/prevention & control; Infection Control.

Abstract: Introduction: Nosocomial Infections constitute a public health problem and bring excess avoidable costs associated with hospital admissions. Over the COVID-19 pandemics there was a shift in policies focusing on infection prevention and control programs. Methods: We postulate that such shift may have an indirect effect in the occurrence of nosocomial infections. We performed a retrospective study aiming to compare the differences in nosocomial infection prevalence between a COVID-19 period and a non-COVID-19 period, in a free-COVID-19 Internal Medicine ward from a central hospital in Lisbon. We included 393 patients, 192 patients being from the non-COVID-19 period and 201 patients from the COVID-19 period. Results: We found a statistically significant reduction in the occurrence of nosocomial infections in the COVID-19 period from 16.1% (n = 31) to 5.5% (n = 11) (p = 0.001; OR 0.301; 95% CI: 0.146-0.617). We also found a statistically significant reduction in antibiotic usage (n = 31; 16.1% vs n = 11; 5.5%; p = 0.001) and in the occurrence of multidrug resistant organism infection (n = 9; 29.0% vs n = 1; 9.1%; p = 0.009) in the COVID-19 period. Conclusion: Our results confirm that after implementation of systematic infection control protocols there was a reduction in nosocomial infections. We suggest further investigation to validate the data obtained and a cost-benefit analysis to clarify whether the universal implementation of infection prevention and control measures will add value to the treatment of patients.