Patients staying in multiple-bed rooms of general medicine and surgical wards do not face a higher risk of Clostridium difficile, a study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology found.
To find whether patients assigned to a multiple-bed room had an increased risk of hospital-onset C. diff, the researchers looked at adult general medical and surgical patients at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
The researchers examined the effect of multiple-bed room exposure at admission and at symptom onset between January 2010 and December 2015.
The researchers found 187 cases they matched with 512 and 515 controls for admission and symptom onset analyses, respectively. Assigning patients to multiple-bed rooms in general medical and surgical wards did not result in an increased risk of developing hospital-onset C. diff, the study found.
"Future investigation should be performed with larger cohorts in multiple sites to more definitively address the question because this issue could have implications for patient room assignment and hospital design," the researchers wrote.