The built hospital environment serves as a significant and continuous reservoir of microbes capable of colonizing and infecting patients.

Cleaning, hand hygiene, and infection control bundles while effective cannot completely eliminate this risk.

Augmenting the built hospital environment with continuously active antimicrobial surfaces fabricated from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency–registered copper surfaces can significantly lower the microbial burden, helping to augment existing infection control strategies.

Addition of a limited number of copper-surfaced components to multibed rooms in pediatric intensive care units resulted in reductions in health care–associated infections (HAI) from 13.0 to 10.6 per 1,000 patient days when comparing the HAI incidence rates of patients cared for in rooms with copper with those cared for in rooms without copper components, respectively, for a crude relative risk reduction of 0.19 (90% confidence interval, 0.46 to -0.22).

Copper surfaces warrant serious consideration when contemplating the introduction of no-touch disinfection technologies for reducing burden to limit acquisition of health care–associated infections.