Nosocomial infection surveillance in Belgian ICUs: aim and methodology of the feedback

The risk for nosocomial infecions (NI) in ICU's is five to ten times higher than in the other hospital care units, with increasing mortality, morbidity, length of stay and costs. Previous studies demonstrated a significant decrease in NI after the set up of effective surveillance programs. If the surveillance is performed in a multicentric setting with representative sample, the results can be dysplayed as a whole but also aggregated for each individual ICU (IICU). The production of meaningful feedback reports may help IICU to evaluate its own situation as compared to that of the whole studied group (WS).