Healthcare-associated infections (HAI) in maternity hospitals of Russian Federation (the state of the problem at the beginning of the XXI century)

Abstract

Over the past decade, the healthcare system of the Russian Federation has undergone progressive changes in the system of maternity care, which relate to the development of infrastructure and the introduction of new organizational models. In particular, a three-level system of providing medical care to mothers and children has been created, including a network of perinatal centers for patients at high perinatal and obstetric risk. Field events of specialists of National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology named after Academician V.I. Kulakov of Ministry of Healthcare of Russian Federation to the medical organizations of maternity care in various regions of Russia revealed hot spots that require primary attention: acute shortage of staff for the implementation of diagnostic and therapeutic measures at the modern methodological level, as well as for ensuring epidemiological safety in the medical organizations (medical microbiologists (bacteriologists), clinical pharmacologists and epidemiologists); the lack of registration of healthcare-associated infections, which is associated with the prevailing in the country mainly punitive methods of combating hospital infections. In modern conditions of nursing preterm babies, newborns with various severe somatic and surgical pathologies, it is necessary to know the real indicators of morbidity in order to reasonably and promptly carry out therapeutic and preventive measures; the need to organize modern microbiological laboratories in the perinatal centers with the availability of fast methods (proteomic and molecular-genetic) diagnostics, allowing for microbiological monitoring in specialized departments of newborns and promptly respond to the changes in the epidemiological situation in the hospital, to prevent the development of clinically pronounced cases of healthcare-associated infections.