VENTILATION ASSOCIATED PNEUMONIA (VAP) IN ACUTE HOSPITALS 

[Date of last update: May 2022]

Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP) is defined as an infection of the lung parenchyma in patients undergoing invasive mechanical ventilation for at least 48 hours.
VAP falls into the category of Hospital Associated Pneumonia (HAP) and is associated with a high mortality rate, increased mechanical ventilation and hospital stay (Papazian et al., 2020) [1]

VAP has been reported to affect 5-40% of patients treated with invasive mechanical ventilation for more than 2 days, with large variations depending on the country, the type of ICU and the criteria used to identify VAP (ATS & IDSA 2005 [2]; Papazian et al., 2020 [1]).

Rates of VAP in North American hospitals have been reported up to 1–2.5 cases per 1000 days of ventilation (Dudeck et al., 2013) [3 ].  European centers, however, report much higher rates. The EU-VAP / CAP study, for example, reported an incidence density of 18.3 episodes of VAP per 1000 ventilation days (Koulenti et al., 2017) [4].

Despite recent advances in microbiological tools, the epidemiological and diagnostic criteria for VAP are still controversial, complicating the interpretation of treatment, prevention and outcome studies. (Papazian et al., 2020) [1].