PITTSBURGH -- Allegheny General Hospital’s Coronary Care Unit (CCU) reached a milestone this week. It has gone more than a year without a single blood stream infection associated with central lines.

A central line is a large intravenous catheter placed in the neck, chest or femoral region to deliver fluids, blood products or medications to patients.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that as many as 250,000 hospital-acquired infections documented each year are associated with use of central lines.

According to the CDC, hospital-acquired infections are a major national health problem, killing close to 100,000 patients in hospitals around the country annually.

Three years ago the hospital took a critical look at the way doctors and nurses inserted and maintained central lines. It found that there was little consistency with the techniques, supplies and barrier precautions used during central line insertion and dressing changes.

Health professionals in AGH’s CCU and Medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) started an ambitious program to create a new, safe standard of care and change how they dealt with central lines.

Joy Peters, RN, nursing director of the CCU, said,” Hospital-acquired infections can be devastating for patients and their families. They are equally distressing for critical care specialists. We decided that there had to be a better approach to the problem of central line infections that even one infection was too many.”

When the program began there was a one in 25 chance a critically ill patient at AGH would get a central line bloodstream infection. Now patients have a one in 527 chance.

Hospital specialists are now focusing on eliminating other common hospital-acquired infections like ventilator-associated pneumonia, antibiotic-resistant staph infections and urinary tract infections.