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"New hospital will be superbug free"

Rendering of the new University Hospital of North Staffordshire
From:  NHS Stoke on Trent
The title of this post is actually the title of a newspaper article that appeared today in the UK. Hospital officials claim that in this new building "MRSA will be eradicated," and even though patients may bring in C. difficile from home, "its chances of spreading once in wards and departments will be zero." The article extols the virtues of a new hospital with more private rooms, and the CEO of the hospital proclaimed "we will have the capability to eradicate hospital associated infections."

Really?

These comments are either incredibly naive, blatantly dishonest, or APIC-speak (i.e., we know this actually can't be achieved, but it's an aspirational goal). Regardless, it's another example of getting-to-zero run amok.

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  1. Eli PerencevichOctober 4, 2011 at 3:24 PM

    This strikes me as an example of hubris on the scale of the Titanic. It appears the Stoke-on-Trent is but a quick flight from the Belfast shipyards where the Titanic was built; might be worth a trip for the CEO. They might also want to checkout Lankford et al. Emerg Infect Dis, Feb 2003. In this study the hypothesized that hand hygiene would increase after construction of a new hospital. It actually decreased from 53% to 23%, p<0.01. They surmised that the decline was due to removal of hallway sinks.

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