Matratzen im Krankenhaus - Grad der bakteriellen Kontamination und Potential von Abstandsgewirken aus hygienischer Sicht

Hospital-acquired infections are a major concern of current healthcare with a pooled prevalence from 7.6 to 10.1% worldwide in terms of negative consequences for the pa-tient like e.g. mortality and length of stay. One possible source of hospital-acquired infections is the hospital bed, since the surface is used long-term by patients. It is the target of this investigation to find out if there is any hygienic risk originating from the encasing or mattress core of the hospital bed. Moreover it will be discussed if a spacer fabric inside the hospital bed might improve the risk of infections. As a first step of this study swabs were taken from encasings and mattress cores. Af-terwards the specimens have been analysed for bacterial growth to get an overview of the bacterial contamination in the current operation. The same procedure has taken place with hospital beds and spacer fabrics after final cleaning. Furthermore there was the try to evaluate the efficacy of processing the mattress encasings by sampling them directly before and after disinfection, but this part wasn´t successful in terms of timely sampling. As a result only 65.3% of mattress cores and 1.8% of encasings were free of bacteria after final cleaning. In 9.1% of encasings and 2.5% of mattress cores bacteria with in-creased pathogenicity for humans were isolated. In contrast to 1.8% bacteria-free encas-ings there were 35.5% of bacteria-free spacer-fabrics and only 3.2% bacteria with in-creased pathogenicity for humans. To sum up this investigation supports the use of spacer-fabrics in terms of hygienic pre-cautions. It can be assumed, that they could be helpful to lower the number of hospital-acquired infections. Anyway, to secure this statement it is necessary to analyse the ef-fect on patient-centered outcomes like rate of hospital-acquired infections, mortality and length of stay in a randomized and controlled trial.