Impact of single room contact precautions on hospital-acquisition and transmission of vancomycin-resistant enterococci in a high-risk setting. VRE Control study

We performed a prospective cohort-study at four German hematology/oncology departments throughout 2016. All study sites screened patients for VRE on admission, weekly and before discharge. Two sites performed single room contact precautions for patients colonized or infected by VRE (SCP sites), the other two did not (NCP sites). Collected isolates from all VRE patients were subjected to whole genome sequencing and core-genome multi-locus sequence typing (cgMLST) to assess clonal relatedness. The latter was defined as a maximum difference of 10 alleles by cgMLST. Screening adherence, hand hygiene compliance and antibiotic exposure both at patient and ward level were assessed as potential confounders.