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C. difficile monthly cases by onset type

Last updated on Monday, 2 September 2024 at 04:38pm

Summary

Topic
C-difficile
Category
cases
API name
c-difficile_cases_countsByOnsetType

Rationale

The timely identification of cases is important for monitoring progress on controlling major healthcare associated infections and for providing the epidemiological evidence needed to inform actions to reduce them.

Methodology

The data is extracted from UKHSA’s data capture system for the mandatory surveillance of bacteraemia and C. difficile which is collected at trust level as described in the mandatory HCAI surveillance protocol. It covers 135 NHS acute trusts and 106 sub-integrated care board locations (previously known as clinical commissioning groups) in England.

Cases are split into one of 5 groups:

  • hospital-onset, healthcare associated (HOHA): specimen date is the same or more than 3 days after the current admission date (where day of admission is day 1).
  • community-onset healthcare-associated (COHA): is not categorised HOHA and the patient was most recently discharged from the same reporting trust in the 28 days prior to the specimen date (where day 1 is the specimen date).
  • community-onset, community associated (COCA): is not categorised HOHA and the patient has not been discharged from the same reporting organisation in the 28 days prior to the specimen date (where day 1 is the specimen date)
  • unknown: the reporting trust answered "Don't know" to the question regarding previous discharge in the month prior to the C. difficile case.
  • no information: the reporting trust did not provide any answer for questions on prior admission.

All NHS acute trusts' chief executives are required to sign-off their CDI data for a given month on day 15 of the following month. Sign-off is used to ensure the quality and accuracy of submitted data. Failure to sign-off can be indicative of missing data and/or an associated data quality problem.

Caveats

Cases are reported by the trust whose laboratory processes the specimen, which may not always reflect where the MRSA bacteraemia was acquired.

Cases that the UKHSA’s HCAI Data Capture System attributes to a commissioning hub (such as the national commissioning hub, 13Q, or one of the regional Health & Justice commissioning hubs) contribute toward the counts of national (highest spatial level) and NHS acute trust Area Types, but are excluded from lower spatial levels, including NHS region, sub-ICB, ICB and UKHSA centre. This means the England and NHS acute trust case totals may be slightly higher than the sum of all cases of other Area Types.

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