Each year in the U.S at least two million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Tom Frieden, MD, Director, CDC www.cdc.gov reports that thousands of lives could be saved every year if healthcare facilities and public health departments would work together to track and stop antibiotic resistance.
He adds, “Public health departments must play a central role in tracking antibiotic resistant threats and facilities must be able to communicate with each other about these infections to prevent spread from one facility to another.”
Health and Human Services (HHS), other federal agencies, hospitals, healthcare systems, and pharmaceutical companies are working hard to track data on antibiotic use and prescribing trends to improve antibiotic use in the future and hope to cut inappropriate prescribing by 50 percent in doctors’ offices and 20 percent in hospitals.
CDC’s Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/solutions-initiative is part of the national strategy to combat antibiotic resistance. The plan is for each state to accelerate outbreak detection and prevention innovation, and improve antibiotic use and reduce antibiotic resistance.
CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) www.cdc.gov/nhsn is the most comprehensive medical event tracking system currently used by more than 16,000 U.S healthcare facilities. These facilities include acute care hospitals, long-term acute care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient dialysis centers, ambulatory surgery centers, and nursing homes.
NHSN collects and provides data on infections and drug resistance and since NHSN collects data directly from healthcare facilities, it can provide facility-level information on Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) and antibiotic resistance.