How should we interpret hospital infection statistics?

Updated indicators of safety and quality for the 2011?12 financial year were released earlier this year by the National Health Performance Authority (NHPA) on the MyHospitals website (http:// www.myhospitals.gov.au). These detail the reports received by the NHPA on a single outcome measure, Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB), and a process measure, compliance with hand hygiene. The universal reaction in the media was to rank hospitals, implying that low hand hygiene and high bacteraemia incidence reflect poor quality of care.1 Although we support the open publication of this information, we caution against overinterpretation of the results.