The Impact of implementing a Strategy on the Rate reduction of Catheter-associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI) in National healthcare facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Background: To address catheter associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) in adult medical surgical (M/S) intensive care units ICUs, a strategy known as CAUTI out of nation (CAUTIoN) was implemented in MOH (Ministry of Health) facilities in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).

Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the implementation of a national strategy, in healthcare facilities and evaluate the outcome of each strategy's components and to compare the pre and post intervention rates of CAUTI.

Methods: It was a retrospective, to assess changes in CAUTI rates after the implementation of strategy.

Results: CAUTI rates reduced by 3.6 percentage points (PP) between the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024. The rate of CAUTI slightly increased to 0.9 per 1000 catheter-days in the first quarter after the intervention, then dropped to 0.34 per 1000 catheter-days in the fourth quarter of 2023, before increasing to 0.62 in the first quarter of 2024.

Conclusions: Strategy implementation of CAUTIoN is found to be effective for turning our organizational vision into action. We retrospectively studied the correlation of interventions and the CAUTI rates. Interventions like leadership, surveillance, data management, training, education and C2C (CAUTIoN to CAUTI) initiative were most effective in the implementation of the strategy.