Burden of healthcare-associated infections in tertiary care hospitals in six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council: A point prevalence survey.

A cross-sectional study using point prevalence survey (PPS) methodology was conducted on May 20, 2024, at 18 tertiary care hospitals located in the 6 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to assess the prevalence of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and associated pathogens. The measured outcome was the presence of active HAIs in different hospital units. During the PPS day, 651 HAI events were detected among 580 patients after reviewing the information of 6826 patients. The prevalence of patients with HAIs was 8.5% (95% CI 7.8%-9.2%). The prevalence was higher in older patients (11.8%, 95% CI 10.2%-13.4%), in intensive care units (24.6%, 95% CI 21.5%-27.8%), and in specialty care areas (12.7%, 95% CI 9.8%-15.7%). The most frequent type of HAIs was pneumonia (27.8%), followed by bloodstream infection (25.0%), urinary tract infection (10.9%), and skin infection (9.7%). Device-associated HAIs represented 15.4% of all HAIs, with ventilator-associated pneumonia, central line-associated bloodstream infection, and catheter-associated urinary tract infection being the main types. Approximately 61.9% of HAIs were microbiologically confirmed. Out of them, 65.3% were caused by Gram-negative bacteria and 31.8% were caused by multidrug-resistant pathogens. The findings confirm that the high HAI burden in GCC hospitals is higher in high-resource countries but lower in lower/middle-resource countries.