ABSTRACT:
Nosocomial infections or hospital acquired infections play a very important role in contributing to hospital mortality. In order to study the nosocomial infection a survey was conducted between 2009 and 2012 of more than 40,000 patients in general hospitals. The data were used to evaluate the influence of nosocomial infections on mortality rates.Hospital infections were more frequent in female patients than male patient. The influence of nosocomial infections was shown to be small for some diseases, such as malignancy, but was greater for others such as metabolic and immunological diseases or trauma. In the case of trauma, nosocomial infections increased hospital mortality rates by a factor of three even after controlling for age. The objective of this study was to appraise the rate of nosocomial infections, frequency of nosocomial pathogens and antimicrobial susceptibility changes in a general hospital. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s definitions were used for nosocomial infection and nosocomial surgical site infections, and nosocomial infection rates were calculated by the number of nosocomial infections per number of hospitalized patients on an annual basis. Higher rates of nosocomial infection were observed in the surgical (26.63%), medical (21.89%), and burn (17.63%) departments. Other departments from where samples were collected were ICU (6%), urology (5%), orthopedic (3.1%), pediatric (3.26%), cardiology (2.63%), cardiac surgery (3.05%), chest surgery (3.94%), ophthalmology (0.84%), neurosurgery (1.32%), urology (5.05%), oncology (3.32%) and dermatology (0.89%). The most frequently isolated pathogens were E.coli, Enterococcus, Enterobacter, Proteus, Klebsiella, Haemophilus, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, streptococcus, and serratia. Antimicrobial susceptibility data on nosocomial pathogens provided valuable guidance for realistic antimicrobial therapy of nosocomial infections.