Most hospitals are not even using basic tactics that have been proven to keep patients from getting catheter-related UTIs in the first place, says the first-ever national study of hospital efforts in preventing catheter-related UTIs.
The study by the University of Michigan Health System and the Veterans Administration's (VA) Ann Arbor Healthcare System appears in the January issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
All 119 VA hospitals in the Unites States were surveyed together with 600 non-federal hospitals.
One in four Americans in a hospital has a urinary catheter and 1 percent of them will get a urinary tract infection from that catheter, the study says, adding they will require antibiotics and a few may suffer life-threatening complications.
UTIs are the most common hospital-acquired infection, responsible for 40 percent of infections, the study says, adding nearly half of hospitals lack a system that tracks which patients have a catheter while three-quarters lack a system that indicates how long a patient was on catheter or whether one has been removed.
