Answer given by Mr Borg on behalf of the Commission

14.6.2013

1. The preliminary results of the survey of Healthcare Associated Infections carried out by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on a sample of 947 hospitals and 231 459 patients indicate an overall 5.7% prevalence of patients with a Healthcare Associated Infection in European acute care hospitals, corresponding to 81 089 patients.

The estimation of the risk to acquire such infection is around 3.5%. So the total annual number of patients with at least one Healthcare Associated Infection in European acute care hospitals in 2011-2012 in the European Union as a whole is estimated at 3.2 million.

2. Clostridium difficile infections represented 3.6% of all Healthcare Associated Infections in the study with an average incidence of 1.4 cases per 1 000 discharges or 2.0 cases per 10 000 patient-days.

3. Healthcare Associated Infections with meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus represent 5.1% of all Healthcare Associated Infections in the survey with an average incidence of 2.0 cases per 1 000 discharges or 2.9 cases per 10 000 patient-days.

4. Figure 1 of the annex presents the prevalence of Healthcare Associated Infections in each of the 30 countries that participated in the study.

5. Figure 2 shows the relative percentage of Clostridium difficile infections per country, as a percentage of the total number of Healthcare Associated Infections per country.

6. The table in the annex shows the percentage of S. aureus isolates resistant to meticillin of the latest report of the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network.

7. New EU case definitions for Healthcare Associated Infections have been adopted in 2012 in order to have a common approach to establish a fully comparable rate in the different Member States.

OJ C 35 E, 06/02/2014