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

Authors

Majid M Alshamrani, Aiman El-Saed, Fayssal Farahat, Mohammed Al Zunitan, Mohammed Abalkhail, Sarah Alfayez, Najiba Mohamed Abdulrazzaq, Afaf Merza Mohamed, Abdulrhman Ibrahim Mohana, Nawal Al Kindi, Jameela Ali Al-Ajmi, Kelly Schrapp, Rana H Almaghrabi, Hussam Alobaida, Amal Al Tai, Fatimah Saad Alshahrani, Zahir O Babiker, Najla Ibrahim Alrabei, Maher Alharbi, Khaled Al Sager, Ahmad Subhi, Wafa Al Nasser, Abdulmajid Al Arfaj, Syed Nazeer, Maida Balila, Alaa Alqurashi, Nouf Alzuhayri, Salman Alhajri, Rasha Alfawaz, Sami Almudarra, Pasi Penttinen

Published in

Epidemiology and infection. Volume 154. Pages e120. Oct 14, 2026. Epub Oct 14, 2026.

Abstract

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.

PMID:
42870570
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 14 Oct 2026.

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