Hospital Hygiene

In Germany, approximately 400,000 to 600,000 patients contract hospital infections, otherwise known as nosocomial infections, and of these cases 10,000 to 15,000 die. The average age of in-patients is rising and older patients are more susceptible to infection, more and more complicated invasive operations are being carried out on increasingly immune-deficient patients, and infectious agents are characterised by extended resistance to classic anti-infective substances, particularly in the hospital environment. It is assumed that approximately 2,000 infections per annum in Germany are caused by multi-resistant Gram-negative pathogens that are resistant to the four commonly used antibiotic groups. At the same time, infections with pan-resistant pathogens, i.e. germs that can no longer be treated with antibiotics, are on the rise worldwide and are increasingly lethal. The number of avoidable hospital infections is hard to quantify. However, based on the data available, an average reduction potential of 20-30% may be expected in Germany.

Hospital hygiene as a focus of health care will definitely gain in importance, above all in view of socio-economic aspects since nosocomial infections lead to a significant increase in the mortality rate and in the duration of hospitalisation, for example.

The goal of the Campus Research Focus “Hospital Hygiene” is to implement an active management of infection prevention and infection control in hospital hygiene. The methods of infection prevention and of early detection of connections relevant to epidemiology are becoming increasingly central to modern hospital hygiene. On the basis of identified infection-epidemiological risk constellations, it should be possible to create more efficient, focused and economically viable infection prevention measures. To this end, documentation of local pathogen epidemiology and risk factor analyses of the persistence and spreading of nosocomial infection pathogens may make a significant contribution to the development of new approaches to prevention.