Relationship between hospital ward design and healthcare-associated infection rates: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Stiller, Andrea; Salm, Florian; Bischoff, Peter; Gastmeier, Petra

The studies were conducted in the United States [17, 20, 24] , Canada [16, 18] , Israel [19, 21, 23] , and France [22] . All but one of the studies were performed in intensive care units. The most frequently used study design was before-intervention and afterintervention observation with or without a control group. The analyzed intervention was the implementation of single patient rooms following ward renovation or moving to a newly built unit. While three studies collected data of the intervention and the control group simultaneously, other studies investigated the same ward before and after the constructional change [16] [17] [18] . Additionally, three studies defined hospital-acquired infection and colonization as events occurring ≥ 72 h after admission in contrast to ≥ 48 h after admission [16, 17, 24] .