Ventilator-associated Pneumonia in the ICU
Kalanuria AA, Zai W, Mirski M. Critical Care 2014;18:208. PMCID: PMC4056625
VAP contributes to approximately half of all cases of hospital-acquired pneumonia and approximately 50% of antibiotics used in ICU’s are for treatment of VAP. This review article is accompanied by excellent tables on recommended therapy for suspected or confirmed multidrug resistant organisms and fungal VAP and also on preventative measures which are divided into ICU and Institution focused measures.
Unfortunately there is still no universally accepted, gold standard diagnostic criterion for VAP.
The clinical pulmonary infection score (CPIS) is used to generate a numerical value between zero and 12 with a score of greater or equal to 6 showing good correlation with the presence of VAP.
I personally haven’t used this but am planning to trial it on my next clinical week.
Have you used this scoring system, if so let us know what you thought?
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