World MRSA Awareness Month – A time to refocus efforts
With the success seen in UK hospitals in reducing MRSA bloodstream infections, October, World MRSA Awareness Month, serves as a timely reminder that a focus on a wider range of infections and their sources should become an ambition for the Department of Health.
MRSA and C.difficile received a lot of media attention and caused significant patient anxiety when infection prevention and control was not the priority it should have been at the beginning of this millennium.
By the time we reached 2004 MRSA was at epidemic levels in our hospitals. The discovery of MRSA on October 2nd 1960 had marked a turning point on how we should view antimicrobial resistance in the new world of fighting infections.
MRSA is the acronym for the micro-organism “Meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus”. Meticillin was the antimicrobial developed in response to the resistance to Penicillin, and its discoverers wrote in the Lancet in 1960 that since cultures have not been encountered showing resistance, it seems unlikely that the selection of resistance strains will take place, if at all. The logic for this was impeccable; however history has shown us that this very bacterium found a new way to build up resistance to this new “wonder drug”. Less than a year after this very optimistic prediction was made in the Lancet, the first MRSA resistant strains appeared in a hospital in England. In 1963 there was the first outbreak of MRSA in a British hospital. A strain of MRSA at the Queen Mary’s hospital for children at Carshalton in Surrey spread to 48 wards, infecting 37 patients and killing one.
It is we feel timely to call on the Department of Health to broaden its focus on MRSA and C.difficile, and introduce measures to address the wider range of infections and causal micro-organisms that are prevalent in all our healthcare settings today.
Recording and reporting respiratory tract infections, catheter associated urinary tract infections and surgical site infections, would provide a focus on preventing many of these avoidable infections, contributing to patient safety, helping to bring sustained reductions in conditions such as sepsis, and other life threatening complications.
Reducing transmission of avoidable infections helps in the battle to tackle the rising problem of antimicrobial resistance. We ask the Department of Health to remember that MRSA bloodstream infections are only a surrogate measure when we consider the much wider range of healthcare associated infections that present a threat to human health.
Make MRSA Awareness Month a time to mark a turning point in focusing on all avoidable infections and reinvigorate the focus on prevention and zero tolerance to avoidable harm by broadening the focus.
Derek Butler
Chair
MRSA Action UK
Telephone: 07762 741114
Email: derek.butler@mrsaactionuk.net
Internet: http://mrsaactionuk.net
Tags: MRSA, Sepsis, Department of Health, Infection Prevention, Patient Safety, Antimicrobial Resistance
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