(North Shore-LIJ: New Hyde Park, NY) -- The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York announces it has gone an entire year without a central-line infection in its Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) – the only children’s hospital in New York to achieve this milestone and one of only several in the nation.

Dr. Arthur Klein, the hospital’s executive director and chief of staff, said hospital and PICU staff celebrated what they called “infection rejection perfection” on July 7, which marked a full year without an infection, during which time the PICU treated 1,647 patients.

Dr. Peter Silver, chief of critical care medicine at Cohen Children’s Medical Center, formerly known as Schneider Children’s Hospital, said the achievement is part of a collaborative effort, orchestrated by the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI), to eliminate pediatric catheter-associated bloodstream infections (CA-BSI). They are thought by many in the medical community to be an unavoidable reality of central line catheter insertion—a process in which infections can be managed but never fully eliminated.

 …