Surveillance: Retrospective versus prospective

Validation of Surveillance in the Intensive Care Unit Component of the German Nosocomial Infections Surveillance System

“…Although the retrospective approach has certain limitations, such as loss of undocumented information, this method seems to be appropriate for the evaluation of the identifi- cation of nosocomial infections 17,18 ; in one investigation, retrospective medical record review was found to be even more sensitive than the prospective approach. 19 In our investigation, we found that discrepancies in diagnosing usually appeared because of uncertainty of the surveillance personnel in diagnosing nosocomial infections (eg, reporting of 2 cases of pneumonia in the same patient because of changes of the microorganism found) or because of surveillance gaps (eg, during personnel vacation) and not because of different approaches regarding the interpretation of the patient medical records because of missing information.…”

Infecção hospitalar: comparação entre dois métodos de vigilância epidemiológica

“…Nas experiências referidas por Hofherr (1979) e Thoburn (1968), a notificação dos médicos identificou 36% e 64% das infecções, respectivamente. Por outro lado, a busca ativa apresentou sensibilidade de 68,5% (Blake, 1980), 70% (Birnbaum, 1981) e 80% (Mulholland, 1975), utilizando diversas fontes de dados. As sensibilidades dos méto-dos em nosso estudo, em relação à identificação de episódios de infecção hospitalar, apresentaram valores semelhantes aos referidos na literatura (ver Quadro II).…”

Abbreviated Surveillance of Nosocomial Urinary Tract Infections: A New Approach

“…While passive surveillance can result in incompleteness of data and delay in identification of problems, it requires less time expenditure than does active surveillance. 3 In the late 1970s we became convinced that the most common site of nosocomial infection-the urinary tractcould be adequately and efficiently monitored by a concurrent review of microbiology reports, avoiding timeconsuming review of in-patient hospital charts. The details of this abbreviated method of surveillance of nosocomial urinary tract infections and an estimate of the time saved in performing surveillance activities are described.…”