title: Nurse-physician collaboration and hospital-acquired infections in critical care.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Nurse-physician collaboration may be related to outcomes in health care-associated infections. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between nurse-physician collaboration and health care-associated infections in critically ill adults.
  
  
  METHODS
  A secondary analysis was done of 5 years of nurses' perception data from 671 surveys from 4 intensive care units. Ventilator-associated pneumonia and central catheter-associated bloodstream infections were examined. Multilevel modeling was used to examine relationships between nurse-physician collaboration and the 2 infections.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Nurse-physician collaboration was significantly related to both infections. For every 0.5 unit increase in collaboration, the rate of the bloodstream infections decreased by 2.98 (P= .005) and that of pneumonia by 1.13 (P= .005). Intensive care units with a higher proportion of certified nurses were associated with a 0.43 lower incidence of bloodstream infections (P= .02) and a 0.17 lower rate of the pneumonia (P= .01). With nursing hours per patient day as a covariate, units with more nursing hours per patient day were associated with a 0.42 decrease in the rate of bloodstream infections (P= .05).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Nurse-physician collaboration was significantly related to health care-associated infections.
authors.affiliation: Christine Boev is an assistant professor of nursing, St John Fisher College, Rochester, New York.Yinglin Xia is a research assistant professor, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. cboev@sjfc.edu.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Boev
authors.affiliation: Christine Boev is an assistant professor of nursing, St John Fisher College, Rochester, New York.Yinglin Xia is a research assistant professor, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.
authors.forename: Yinglin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xia
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003422:Critical Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003428:Cross Infection / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005260:Female; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D017053:Infection Control / Q000458:organization & administration*; D007362:Intensive Care Units; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D063868:Patient Outcome Assessment; D019555:Physician-Nurse Relations; D012737:Sex Factors; D055815:Young Adult