This is the podcast, ICU rounds.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Guy.

I'm an associate professor of surgery and director at the Burns Center

at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Today, again, on our discussion of no socomial infections. Our last podcast was on ventilator of nosocomial infections.

Our last podcast was on ventilator-associated pneumonia, and today we're going to talk about

catheter-related bloodstream infections.

We've had a couple of podcasts recently about some of the complications of insertion of

central venous catheters, some of the complications, mechanical and

otherwise, of the dwelling of central venous catheters. And today we're going to pick on central

venous catheters even more, but we're going to focus on catheter-related bloodstream infections.

When we think of bacteremia, particularly in a critical ill patient, 75% of all bloodstream infections originate

from central venous catheters.

And they occur at a frequency of between 1.2 and 5.8 catheter-related bloodstream infections

per thousand days.

And has an estimated mortality between 12 and 25 percent and an increase in length of stay from 10 to 40 days.

So you can certainly see increases in mortality rate and increases in length of stay associated with central venous catheter infections.

Now there are several factors that can cause a catheter-associated bloodstream infection,

and most of those factors are modifiable, meaning there are things that we can do

to certainly decrease the incidence of catheter-associated bloodstream infections.

The first, the most obvious, is not putting the catheter in.

And that really takes some real cultural change.

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