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Improving Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection Rates in the Medical Units
  1. Haytham Taha,
  2. Salama J. Raji,
  3. Abeer Khallaf,
  4. Seham Abu Hija,
  5. Raji Mathew,
  6. Hanan Rashed,
  7. Christelle Du Plessis,
  8. Zaytoen Allie,
  9. Samer Ellahham
  1. Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, United Arab Emirates
  1. Correspondence to Haytham Taha, MD htaha{at}seha.ae

Abstract

Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC) in Abu Dhabi is the main tertiary care referral hospital in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with 560 bed capacity with a high occupancy rate. SKMC senior management has made a commitment to make quality and patient safety a top priority. Preventing health care associated infections, including Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI), is a high priority for our hospital.

In order to improve CAUTI rates a multidisciplinary task force team was formed and led this performance improvement project. The purpose of this publication is to indicate the quality improvement interventions implemented to reduce CAUTI rates and the outcome of those interventions.

We chose to conduct the pilot study in General Medicine as it is the busiest department in the hospital, with an average of 390 patients admitted per month during the study period. The study period was from March 2015 till April 2016. Our aim was to reduce CAUTI rates per 1000 device days in the medical units. Implemented interventions resulted in a reduction of CAUTI from 6.8 per 1000 device days in March 2015 to zero CAUTI in February through April 2016.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See:

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