Assessment of the effectiveness of body substance precautions as the infection control system of a large teaching hospital.
BACKGROUND
Body substance precautions was the name given to the body substance isolation-based infection control system that was introduced in January 1990 at a Canadian university hospital with 650 acute care beds and 570 long-term care beds. When the body substance precautions system was begun, traditional category-specific isolation was discontinued.


METHODS
After 2 years, we reviewed the incidence of several types of nosocomial infections and the frequency of isolation of hospital strains of bacteria before and after the introduction of body substance precautions to find out whether this system was as effective as the previous system of infection control.


RESULTS
Most nosocomial infections did not increase. There was another likely cause for the only one that did. For many years, we had isolated patients infected or colonized by hospital bacteria, limiting their spread throughout the institution. Body substance precautions proved equally effective in doing this.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results to date therefore indicate that the body substance precautions system was as successful as category-specific isolation used with other standard infection control techniques in maintaining low rates of nosocomial infections and in controlling the dissemination of hospital strains of bacteria in our institution. Body substance precautions provided a satisfactory alternative to universal precautions and traditional isolation categories for the protection of health care workers against the risk of infection by blood-borne viruses.
Duncan
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Microbiology Department, Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Batchelor
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C
D001826:Body Fluids; D003428:Cross Infection / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000382:microbiology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D004352:Drug Resistance, Microbial; D006746:Hospital Bed Capacity, 500 and over; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D017053:Infection Control / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D008134:Long-Term Care; D009864:Ontario; D010356:Patient Isolation; D015397:Program Evaluation; D016635:Universal Precautions