Worthing Hospital, a 500-bed District General Hospital in Worthing, West Sussex, England is celebrating a nice achievement: No MRSA for one year. How did they achieve success? According to
this article, "infection control has become a priority for the trust...and has seen improvements such as an increase in cleaning rounds and extra training for the housekeeping staff, detailed root cause analysis of any MRSA case, investment in all levels of nursing and a highly qualified team of infection control specialists, who work with ward staff to ensure they always follow the best practice." The hospital also reports no C. diff in November.
For me, the article is most interesting for the picture and what they don't say. No mention is made of active surveillance cultures and they don't seem to be showing off nares swabs in their photo. It all seems rather
horizontal-ish. High fives Worthing Hospital!
The web page has 2 people (patients' relatives) saying they know of cases of C diff in November. This shows the difficulty of self-reporting, self-surveillance, etc.
ReplyDeleteI think that is an interesting point. Although, both the article and patients' relatives could be correct if the C. diff appeared prior to or on admission or was acquired after outpatient antibiotics. Another possibility was that it was acquired at another facility. The curse of infection prevention is that we can only hope to prevent transmission in our own hospital but often get the "credit/blame" for things beyond our control. For example, much of the MRSA decline recently is surely due to factors outside of our control, such as general declines in the community, just like much of the increases in the early 2000's was do to similar uncontrollable factors.
DeleteReally??? Ask my mum what she had earlier in the year. Brighton general had to save her life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDelete