Clostridium difficile infection, hospital geography and time-space clustering

摘要

To analyse spatial and temporal relationships of Clostrdium difficile-associated disease in an Inner-city hospital, we retrospectively evaluated 283 episodes of confirmed C. difficile diarrhoea in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital between 1995 and 1998, against a background of relatively stable case mix, antibiotic usage and admission numbers, using Knox analysis to determine the presence of disease clustering in time and space.