Patients' risk of having a healthcare-associated infection was 16 percent lower in 2015 than in 2011, a CDC research team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The findings come from the CDC's 2015 HAI Prevalence Survey, a multi-state survey to determine how common HAIs are in U.S. hospitals.
Here are three other survey findings:
1. About 1 in 31 hospital patients has at least one HAI on any given day.
2. Fewer patients had HAIs in 2015 (3.2 percent) than in 2011 (4 percent), largely due to decreases in surgical-site and urinary tract infections.
3. The most common HAIs in the 2015 study were:
- Pneumonia (26 percent of all infections)
- Gastrointestinal infections (21 percent)
- SSIs (16 percent)
- Bloodstream infections unrelated to an infection at another site (12 percent)
- UTIs (9 percent)
Click here for more information on the survey methods.
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