[brian]

Review Urges Aggressive MRSA Screening for Health Workers

Even good adherence to infection control did not entirely prevent transmission, study finds

In hospitals and other health-care facilities with endemic methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), aggressive screening of health-care workers should be combined with other measures to help reduce infection rates, new research suggests.

The Swiss and South African authors, who reviewed data from 169 studies of 33,318 health-care workers in 37 countries, found that 4.6 percent of the workers carried MRSA, and, of these, 5.1 percent had clinical MRSA infections.

"Poor infection control practices were implicated in both acquisition and transmission of MRSA by personnel, but even good adherence to infection control -- including masks and hand hygiene -- did not entirely prevent transmission of MRSA from heavily colonized staff to patients," they wrote.

A recent review of MRSA outbreaks suggested that health-care worker screening should focus on those with symptoms of MRSA infection, but this approach would likely miss a large number of MRSA-infected workers with no symptoms, the review authors said.


Full Story: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/n...ory_63678.html

[RN-Cardiac]

Those numbers aren't as high as I expected. I really assumed if you did a nasal swab on everyone w/direct pt care in a hospital or LTC that most of us would be positve!! Which is why I assumed no such testing had been done. What would you do if you had half of your staff test positive?

[longjourneydream]

Originally Posted by RN-Cardiac

Those numbers aren't as high as I expected. I really assumed if you did a nasal swab on everyone w/direct pt care in a hospital or LTC that most of us would be positve!! Which is why I assumed no such testing had been done. What would you do if you had half of your staff test positive?

That sure sounds like a real nightmare! I worked ER for a short while, and the number of MRSA infected patients rose from a couple a day to several a day. Now working on a medical cardiac floor, numbers are doubling to a couple of years ago.

Isolation practices are not being followed, from the patient visitors to the nursing staff, as well as doctors. I really and truly belive,that hospital staff could pass MRSA; especially those that are immune compromised.


Yes, it would be interesting to see what health administrators would do in a sitution when one half the staff would test postive.

[oramar]

what do you know it was me,http://allnurses.com/forums/f82/mrsa...ff-258232.html,