From Study Results to Scientific Papers

The Josep Trueta award is given to individual or group research within the field of health sciences, which results in one or more scientific publications from around the world in the last five years.

Aina Gomila’s research resulted in five scientific publications in high-impact international magazines. This research focused on the evaluation of different preventive measures in the management and the health impact of surgical infections in elective colon and rectal surgery in 10 hospitals of Catalonia participating in the VINCat program (a program of the Catalan Health Service that establishes a unified surveillance system for nosocomial infections in hospitals in Catalonia). These publications have been part of her doctoral thesis “Current challenges in the prevention, management and outcomes of surgical site infections in elective colorectal surgery“, supervised by Dr. Miquel Pujol and Dr. Jordi Carratalà (both partners in COMBACTE). Aina’s doctoral thesis also received a cum laude qualification from the University of Barcelona.

“After finishing my specialization, there was a COMBACTE project going to start in the department led by Dr. Miquel Pujol and Dr. Evelyn Shaw and there was a need for a person to manage it.

I started recruiting patients for COMBACTE-MAGNET‘s RESCUING study, and I am currently acting as co-investigator in the analysis and writing of the results of the study. Two articles have already been published and a third is being evaluated for publication. RESCUING was a retrospective study that included 20 hospitals from South and South-Eastern Europe, Turkey and Israel that analyzed different aspects of complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs) in a setting of high multidrug-resistance.”

“The first publication identifies predictive factors for having a multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (MDR-GNB) cUTI. We observed great variability on rates of MDR-GNB among the different participating hospitals, and our predictive model helped find patients at high risk of having a MDR-GNB, in order to restrict the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics in this group.

In the second publication, we identified several risk for having a cUTI caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and MDR P. aeruginosa cUTI, a microorganism of special relevance due to its virulence and intrinsic antimicrobial resistance. Also, the prognosis of these patients was described.

In the third article we evaluate the relationship between developing a catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CA-UTI) and 30-day mortality but these results are not published yet.”

Aina presented results of the RESCUING study (risk factors and prognosis of P. aeruginosa cUTI, characteristics and risk factors of acute pyelonephritis in patients with cUTI and factors influencing 30-day mortality in patients with CA-UTI) as oral communications or posters at the  European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) 2018 and 2019, and in the Healthcare Infection Society International Conference in 2018 in Liverpool.

Aina also collaborated in COMBACTE-MAGNET’s EPI-Net – the network that identifies and maps existing surveillance systems, to establish frameworks for data collection to support antibacterial drug development.

“I worked with the main investigator from University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands, and our Information Technology responsible to develop different algorithms to detect patients at high and low risk of having a surgical site infection (SSI) after cardiac, colorectal and orthopedic surgery in a retrospective cohort of patients at our hospital. After testing the algorithm, I also checked individually all discrepant patients (patients identified as low risk of SSI by the algorithm but who in fact did have an SSI or vice versa) looking for the reason of discrepancy to improve the algorithm. The final algorithm showed good performance. Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge is now looking into implementing this algorithm in order to do semi-automated surveillance of SSI”.