FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 355:2781-2783 December 28, 2006 Number 26 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text PDF PDA Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited E-mail When Letters Appear Related Article by Pronovost, P. PubMed Citation

Each year, 36 million patients are admitted to acute care hospitals in the United States, staying for 164 million days.¹ Eleven percent (18 million days) of these hospitalizations are spent in intensive care units (ICUs). For 54% of the days (9.7 million) that patients are in ICUs, central venous catheters remain in place for the infusion of medications and fluids. Regrettably, the use of these devices results in 48,600 associated bloodstream infections (5 per 1000 catheter-days).² The leading pathogens, in descending order, are coagulase-negative staphylococci, Staphylococcus aureus, enterococcus species, and candida species. Morbidity is significant with bloodstream infections. At least . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the Department of Internal Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Pronovost, P. J, Berenholtz, S. M, Needham, D. M (2008). Translating evidence into practice: a model for large scale knowledge translation. BMJ 337: a1714-a1714 [Full Text]