Objectives: To establish a surveillance system as an element of internal quality management, participating intensive care units (ICUs) report their ICU-associated infection surveillance data for aggregation into a national database.
Methods: In order to provide data on ICU-associated infections, a nosocomial surveillance system in German intensive care units (Krankenhaus-Infections-Surveillance-System (KISS)) started in 1997. The method of data collection is based on the (adult) ICU surveillance component from the National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance (NNIS)-System. Until now 113 German ICUs (most of them medical/surgical ICUs) were included in this system. We continuously collected and calculated the data from site-specific infections (device-associated pneumonias, blood stream infections and urinary tract infections).
Results: There are now a total of 393,177 patient-days (100,015 patients) among them 176,415 ventilator-days, 295,221 central line-days and 316,799 urinary catheter-days in the data base. The data analysis showed the following device-associated infection rates: 11.2 pneumonias/1000 ventilator-days, 1.8 primary bloodstream infections/1000 central line-days and 4.0 urinary tract infections/1000 urinary catheter-days.
Conclusion: The project has reached high interest in Germany and animated more ICUs to take part or to apply the same method in order to use the reference data for comparison.