What is E coli?
Eschericia coli (E. coli) is a gut bacteria that is the main cause for urinary tract infections as well as causing other infections such as blood stream infections.
How do people contract E coli?
E. coli infections are most often seen in the community and the numbers of infections caused by E. coli have been increasing over the past few years.
As a result of the increase in the number of infections, the Department of Health asked NHS acute trusts, like ours, to report episodes of E. coli in our hospitals from 1 June 2011.
Why do we measure E coli infections?
Unlike Clostridium difficile or MRSA, there is not maximum number of E. coli infections that a trust can have in any one year.
Instead, they are recorded and investigated to gather information. By doing this, it is hoped that hospitals will accurately determine the cause for the rise in E. coli infections and, therefore, be able to establish interventions in the future to prevent avoidable infections.
Monthly E. coli infections
Below you can find our monthly report on E. coli infections in our hospitals:
- June 2011: 19
- July 2011: 21
- August 2011: 25
- September 2011: 14
- October 2011: 21
- November 2011: 20
- December 2011: 16
- January 2012: 13
- February 2012: 17
- March 2012: 19
- April 2012: 19
- May 2012: 9
These figures are the total number of cases and include both Trust and community cases. However, the vast majority of our numbers are community-acquired cases.
