One in 10 patients contract infections in hospital, including in surgical wounds, urinary tract infections (UTIs), and pneumonia, warns the first Australian study of its kind in more than 30 years.

Hospitals are where we usually go to get better but these largely preventable hospital-acquired infections can be fatal, or risk making sick patients even sicker, and chew up hospital resources.

One in 10 adult acute patients have a hospital-acquired infection. Credit:Louie Douvis

But Australia does not have a national surveillance system that tracks all types of hospital-acquired infections, and many hospitals do not routinely monitor rates of some of the most common infections such as UTIs and pneumonia, the researchers warned.

Their study took a snapshot of the rates of all infections across 19 large Australian hospitals in major cities and regional hubs on a given day, surveying 2767 adult acute patients between August and November 2018.