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Tuesday, 02/17/2009
New European consensus document for management of hospital pneumonia
The conclusions include novelties such as the incorporation of new treatments that did not exist when the previous guidelines were drawn up.
Considerable disagreement persists regarding hospital-acquired pneumonia and ventilator-associated pneumonia. This circumstance has led to the initiative to create a consensus document that unifies the criteria of the 3 main European societies linked to these diseases—the European Respiratory Society (ERS), the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. The person chosen to coordinate this project and represent the ERS was Dr. Antoni Torres, head of the respiratory medicine department of Hospital Clínic, Barcelona and leader of the research team on the spiritual diseases at the Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS). He is the principal author of the article published in the Journal Intensive Care Medicine (35:9-29), which lists the 20 points of agreement that were reached.
The conclusions include novelties such as the incorporation of new treatments that did not exist when the previous guidelines were drawn up. Changes have also been discussed regarding the definition of hospital-acquired pneumonia and the change has been proposed for the name of ventilator-associated pneumonia, which is due to the ventilation and not to the apparatus itself. The document recommends procedures such as subglottic suction or the half-sitting position, a strategy proposed by the team headed by Dr. Antoni Torres in The Lancet (354:1851-8) in 1999.
These documents are an indispensable tool for ensuring that patients receive care based on the most innovative scientific knowledge. The 20 points of consensus, which were reached thanks to this task force, provide the basis for developing future clinical guidelines and stimulate research in areas where the answers are still not completely satisfactory. The article indicates that it is impossible to completely eliminate pneumonia associated with stays in hospital but that there is a significant margin for improving on current results.
author: http://blog.hospitalclinic.org