One of the main reasons for poor response in organ donation is the lack of positive attitudes and knowledge present in health care professionals. Definite legislation, policies and programmes dealing with brain death and cadaveric organ transplantation have shown some favourable results in terms of increasing donor rates. These programmes are mainly Western based; therefore adopting such programmes to be used locally may not be adequate or proper. To address this issue, we decided to carry out a questionnaire in two tertiary hospitals in Malaysia, one with a well establish brain death and cadaveric organ transplantation programme and one with none.
CU-acquired nosocomial infection (NI) remains one of the major causes of ICU mortality. This study presents the incidence of ICU-acquired nosocomial infection in ICU HUKM for the years 1998 and 1999, as part of the ongoing ICU-acquired nosocomial infection surveillance program. The overall incidence was 23%. The main types of NI was lower respiratory tract infection (15.3%), primary bacteraemia (8.1%), ventilator associated pneumonia (5.4%), urinary tract infection (2.0%), skin infection (1.6%) central venous catheter sepsis (1.2%) and surgical skin infection (0.8%). The overall culture positive nosocomial infection rate was only 12.1%, majority from the lungs (12.6%), blood (7.3%), skin swabs (2.0%), and urine (1.6%). The main gram-negative organism cultured was Acinetobacter sp. (19%) and Staph. aureus (8.5%) was the gram-positive organism. The overall ICU mortality rate was 27.5% of which 60.9% of patients who died were attributed directly to sepsis.