Urinary tract infection

Definition of healthcare-associated urinary tract infection (UTI)

A UTI is defined as at least one positive urine culture. Only urine cultures with no more than two different microorganisms are included. At least one of the microorganisms must show growth of >= 10,000 colonies/ml of urine.
To be qualified as a healthcare-associated UTI, the sampling date needs to fall within a period corresponding to the length of contact with the hospital service, which starts 48 hours after contact and ends 48 hours after contact.
The abovementioned definition does not apply to infants below 1 year of age.

Which department/hospital is the infection attributed to?

Number and incidence are calculated for departments responsible for the treatment (contact responsibility) and for the places of stay (addresses of stay). An infection is attributed to the department responsible for contact in the 48 hours leading up to the sampling date and to the section (address of stay) where the patient was 48 hours before the urine culture was taken. HAIBA shows the infection at the time the urine culture was taken.

When is a new infection counted?

A new UTI is counted when a new positive urine culture is recorded more than 30 days after the first positive urine culture.

How is incidence calculated?

To calculate the incidence, the denominator needs to be defined. For a UTI, the denominator is the length of the hospital contact in hours, calculated as the number of days at risk. Hours after a UTI has occurred or after a patient died are not counted in the denominator. Incidence is shown as the number of UTIs per 10,000 risk days.