Catheter associated bloodstream infection (CABSI) rates are a piece of quality data. Catheters are tubes that are inserted into the patient’s body. Some catheters are inserted directly into the patient’s veins to allow for easier delivery of medications. These catheters are important for patient care, particularly in the intensive care unit (ICU), but they can sometimes become infected. These infections are dangerous because they can move into the patient’s bloodstream and possibly cause a more serious infection elsewhere. When this happens, the infection is known as a catheter associated bloodstream infection (CABSI). Packard Children’s Hospital measures its CABSI rate as the number of infections per 1000 central line days (the total number of days patients had a central line in place). If two patients had a central line in for five days each, that is a total of 10 central line days. Below are CABSI rates for Lucile Packard Children's Hospital's pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients. We report the PICU rate because there is a national benchmark available for comparison. A low score is better than a high score. A lower score means that we had fewer catheter associated bloodstream infections in the pediatric intensive care unit.
*Benchmark data are the national CABSI rates collected by the National Healthcare Safety Network of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). What This Graph Says Packard Children’s Hospital’s rate is lower than the national average found in other PICUs. However the difference in the two rates is not statistically significant. Packard Children’s Hospital’s average CABSI rate between March 2007-February 2008 was 3.5. This means there were 3.5 catheter associated bloodstream infections for every 1000 days that patients collectively had a central line inserted.
*Benchmark data are the national CABSI rates collected by the National Healthcare Safety Network of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). What This Graph Says Our performance has improved over the past year. The graph shows Lucile Packard Children's Hospital’s PICU CABSI rate (blue line) over time compared to the average benchmark standard (orange line) of 5.3. Our CABSI rate has decreased over time. What We Are Doing to Improve the CABSI RateReducing the CABSI rate has been a hospital initiative for the past several years. We expect continued improvements until we reach our goal of zero preventable catheter associated infections. Our activities to reduce CABSIs include:
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital is located in Palo Alto, adjacent to Stanford University Hospital, approximately 20 miles north of San Jose, CA and 40 miles south of San Francisco.
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