Hospital Unit Lowers C. diff Infections Using AHRQ Safety Program

https://www.ahrq.gov/hai/cusp/index.html Using AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP), Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit has reduced the incidence of Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections in its nephrology unit by 90 percent since January 2023. The hospital used the CUSP framework to engage frontline staff and significantly reduce hospital-acquired C. diff, a dangerous and highly contagious infection. Some of these interventions have now been adopted across the 800-bed hospital. The hospital nephrology unit's C. diff team is pictured above. CUSP is a method that can help clinical teams make care safer by combining improved teamwork, clinical best practices and the science of patient safety. The Core CUSP toolkit gives clinical teams the training resources and tools to apply the CUSP method and build their capacity to address patient safety issues. Patients in the 34-bed nephrology unit are vulnerable and at high risk of infection; many need dialysis multiple times each week. Those with end-stage renal disease are twice as likely to develop C. diff as other patients. Using a nurse-driven protocol to verify C. diff in patients with symptoms, the nephrology unit launched a number of interventions in early 2023 to bring down the number of C. diff infections. Within the first year, the hospital-onset C. diff rate dropped by about 70 percent; by the end of 2024, it was down 90 percent. Learn more in a new AHRQ impact story. All AHRQ impact stories are available for viewing here. https://www.ahrq.gov/news/newsroom/case-studies/202501.html Impact Case Studies https://www.ahrq.gov/news/newsroom/case-studies/index.html