Clostridioides difficile or C diff is an important type of bacteria that can cause diarrhoea, particularly in people who have taken antibiotics or been in hospital. Most of the time, doctors can successfully treat C diff infections, but they can be serious and even life-threatening in some people.
In the early 2000s, C diff was a major problem in hospitals, including causing large outbreaks with patients passing it on to other patients. Using fewer and different antibiotics in hospitals, and changes in cleaning and how patients were managed, helped the number of infections to drop a lot.
Now, C diff infections have started rising again. We want to study how the number of infections, and what type of patients are getting C diff, has changed in Oxfordshire between 2006 and 2023. We also want to see whether the infections have got more or less serious over time, by looking at whether people with C diff have shorter or longer stays in hospital over time, or are passing away more or less often over time. We will compare patients with C diff and patients who were tested for C diff (so probably had diarrhoea), but tested negative, that is, something else was causing their diarrhoea. We want to understand why C diff is causing problems again, and how we can manage people with C diff better in future.