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Medicina Interna
versión impresa ISSN 0872-671X
Resumen
MOREIRA, Laura Bonito et al. Nosocomial Infections. COVID-19: A Friend or Foe?. Medicina Interna [online]. 2022, vol.29, n.1, pp.13-19. Epub 01-Abr-2022. ISSN 0872-671X. https://doi.org/10.24950/rspmi.2022.01.292.
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.
Palabras clave : COVID-19; Cross Infection/prevention & control; Infection Control..