Healthcare-Associated Infections in California Hospitals Annual Report, 2016

California hospitals report specific types of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) (Health and Safety Code section 1288.55).  CDPH publishes hospital HAI data to provide consumers and healthcare purchasers important information to evaluate the quality of care among California hospitals. CDPH intends for this annual report to prompt hospitals to act by accelerating HAI prevention efforts. Most HAIs can be prevented if health care personnel strictly follow existing infection prevention practices for all care encounters and communicate infection information when transferring patients.

In 2016, 400 general acute care hospitals reported 18,924 HAIs to CDPH.  Overall, California hospitals are better than national standard populations (baselines) for three types of infections and worse than the national baseline for one infection type (figure).

The lowest statewide HAI incidence is among deep and organ/space surgical site infections, which occur as a result of contamination during surgery (ratio of reported and predicted infections, 0.91). The highest statewide HAI incidence (ratio 1.07) is for a type of diarrhea that occurs when a patient is treated with antibiotics and inadvertently ingests the organism, C. difficile, a common pathogen in health care facilities. 
For more details, please read the full report.

Annual HAI Report

Healthcare-Associated Infections Annual Report , 2016 (PDF)

HAI Interactive Map

Please also visit the My Hospital’s Infections map to see how your hospital’s HAI results compare with others.     

The methods used to develop the report are summarized in the technical notes.    

Data tables are available on the California Health and Human Services Open Data Portal (Select Diseases and Conditions).