Preventing Postoperative Healthcare Associated Infections: The Experience of Two European Cardiac Surgery Intensive Care Units

The phenomenon of healthcare–associated infections (HAIs), formerly called nosocomial infections (NIs) [1], has been well recognized in the literature. In the cardiovascular ICUs, HAIs may result in significant patient morbidity and mortality, prolonged duration of hospital stay, and additional costs due to diagnostic and therapeutic interventions [2]. For this reason, HAIs are considered an indicator of the quality of patient care, an adverse event, and a patient safety issue. The use of illness severity scores is very common in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) in order to predict outcome, differentiate disease severity and assess resource use [3]. The Simplified Acute Physiology Score II (SAPS II) [4] is a very commonly used score in Europe to compare a critically ill patient’s severity and to evaluate clinical course and outcome [5].