Indwelling urinary catheter use in the postoperative period: analysis of the national surgical infection prevention project data.

OBJECTIVES To describe the frequency and duration of perioperative catheter use and to determine the relationship between catheter use and postoperative outcomes. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING Two thousand nine hundred sixty-five acute care US hospitals. PATIENTS Medicare inpatients (N = 35 904) undergoing major surgery (coronary artery bypass and other open-chest cardiac operations; vascular surgery; general abdominal colorectal surgery; or hip or knee total joint arthroplasty) in 2001. Main Outcome Measure Postoperative urinary tract infection. RESULTS Eighty-six percent of patients undergoing major operations had perioperative indwelling urinary catheters. Of these, 50% had catheters for longer than 2 days postoperatively. These patients were twice as likely to develop urinary tract infections than patients with catheterization of 2 days or less. In multivariate analyses, a postoperative catheterization longer than 2 days was associated with an increased likelihood of in-hospital urinary tract infection (hazard ratio, 1.21; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04-1.41) and 30-day mortality (parameter estimate, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.37-0.72) as well as a decreased likelihood of discharge to home (parameter estimate, - 0.57; 95% CI, - 0.64 to - 1.51). CONCLUSIONS Indwelling urinary catheters are routinely in place longer than 2 days postoperatively and may result in excess nosocomial infections. The association with adverse outcomes makes postoperative catheter duration a reasonable target of infection control and surgical quality-improvement initiatives.