You're listening to the Hospital Medicine podcast with your host, Dr. Gil Parat.

In today's topic, we are talking about ventilator-associated pneumonia.

The world can be prone to understatement.

I remember when the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer got caught and he said,

I really messed up this time.

And along those lines, I would say an understatement is that we are not particularly great

at identifying both clinically and for surveillance purposes what VAP, ventilator-associated

pneumonia is, in terms of both having definitions that have good

specificity and sensitivity. And I think it's also more than fair to say that there has been a lot

of variability on how individual hospitals report conditions like VAP or VAC,

ventilator-associated conditions.

So controversy and accuracy regarding when someone truly has a ventilator-associated pneumonia

is probably beyond the scope of my discussion on this topic,

but prevention still can be addressed.

So the timing for talking about ventilator-associating pneumonia

couldn't be much better because it was just released in August of 2014 the update on the guidelines for preventing

ventilator-associated pneumonia's, and that was printed in the journal called Infection Control

and Hospital Epidemiology. And these guidelines are backed by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, as well as the

Infectious Disease Society of America, and the American Hospital Association, among others.

And right off the bat in these guidelines, they admit that the true incidence of BAP is very

difficult because it's been somewhat subjective

and non-specific.

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