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2022 HAI Progress Report released by the CDC

When it comes to public health and health care, improvement of patient safety and prevention of adverse events are top priorities for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A major consideration for these efforts is health care-associated infections (HAIs), which arise during medical or surgical care.  

In the 2022 “National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) Progress Report,” the CDC provides a summary of HAI rates across three health care settings: acute care hospitals (ACHs), inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs) and long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs). These settings are stratified based on type of services, amount of acute care inpatient beds and average length of stay. The report provides statistics about specific HAIs, including central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), ventilator-associated events (VAE), surgical site infections (SSI), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bloodstream events and Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) infections, in each U.S. state and some territories as well as reporting mandates and data validation efforts.

2022 National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report

View the report

For the first time since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been measurable progress in the country’s effort to prevent many important HAIs in ACHs with significant decreases in CLABSI (down 9%), CAUTI (down 12%), VAE (down 19%) and CDI (down 3%) between 2021 and 2022. While these data are promising, other health care settings such as IRFs and LTACHs showed little progress, highlighting the continued need for enrichment of infection prevention and control practices.

Reports such as this HAI progress report are part of the CDC’s commitment to health care safety. Part of this commitment is providing shared resources for HAI prevention, such as the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), the nation’s most widely used HAI surveillance system, which is comprised of more than 38,000 active hospitals, long-term care facilities and other health care facilities. The data provided to NHSN is used for national- and state-level analyses, including the HAI Report, as well as to develop targeted prevention initiatives. Efforts to improve patient care practices in U.S. health care facilities are paramount: It is estimated that approximately 1 in 31 U.S. patients and 1 in 43 nursing home residents contract an HAI every day. Although this report shows a great deal of progress has been made, there is more that can be done.