text_1: Program Cut Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections
text_2: HealthDay highlights a national effort to help reduce an uncomfortable and costly problem: hospital-acquired urinary tract infections (UTIs), and specifically those caused by indwelling catheters. These devices are tubes that snake up the urethra into a person’s bladder, are anchored there with an inflatable balloon, and continuously drain a patient’s urine. HealthDay nicely captures the scope of the problem, noting that one in five hospital patients are catheterized, and that, of these, 20% are bound to get a UTI. Looking at a typical year, this adds up to about 250,000 hospital-acquired UTIs and roughly $250 million in healthcare costs. The story included quotes from Dr. Sanjay Saint, the lead author of the new study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The story breaks down his team’s effort to attack catheter-caused UTIs with a program called “Stop CAUTI,” which is a government-sponsored training toolkit to not only reduce indwelling catheterization rates, but also help caretakers use better technique when they have to insert the devices. The results, as HealthDay explains them? It’s not clear; we’re not given many quantified benefits or study details, and the results that are included happen to conflict with each other. Also missing was a discussion around limitations of the research. Indwelling catheters are very common sights at hospitals, since nurses can insert them once and they rarely slip out (a balloon at the end holds them in place). However, about 75% of UTIs are caused by such catheters, according to the CDC, and more than two-thirds of those infections are thought to be avoidable — both through better caretaker training and by avoiding the use of indwelling catheters. Given the suffering and cost, any program that could decrease the rate of such infections, especially one without any new medical devices — just training sessions and use of alternative, short-term catheterization — would be welcomed by patients, hospitals, insurance companies, and taxpayers alike.