A new analysis of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) at hospitals in the southeastern United States highlights some of the downstream healthcare impacts of COVID-19.The study, published this week in Clinical Infectious Diseases by a team of researchers from Duke University and the University of North Carolina, found that rates of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), ventilator-associated events (VAEs), and Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) at hospitals in six southeastern states rose significantly during the pandemic compared with previous years.
But the impact was most keenly felt in smaller community hospitals."During the pandemic, the volume and acuity of COVID-19 cases quickly overwhelmed the very limited resources in community hospitals in these areas," the study authors wrote.The findings aren't surprising, since previous studies have documented the uptick in HAIs seen in US hospitals during the first year of the pandemic.
Those increases, which followed years of HAI declines at US hospitals, were mainly the result of overwhelmed, short-staffed hospitals dealing with a crush of severely ill patients and having fewer resources to devote to infection prevention and control and patient safety.This is the first study, however, to address how small, rural hospitals with fewer resources were affected by the pandemic.Community hospitals struggledTo evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on HAI incidence and trends in different-size hospitals, the researchers analyzed data on hospital-level incidence rates (IR) from two large academic medical centers—Duke University Hospital and the University of North Carolina Medical Center—and 51 community hospitals belonging to the Duke Infection Control