Weekly NICU MRSA swabs

[countyERNICU]

Does your unit do weekly MRSA swabs? Our level III nicu does, and as of late its been a bit of a problem. One of our coworkers said that a level IV childrens hospital down the road does not do the weekly swabs. Just curious.

[essT]

We only do MRSA swabs in a couple situations -- babies born to mothers with a history of MRSA and babies coming to our unit from other hospitals (we send out for certain procedures and also accept patients from surrounding facilities). All of these patients are placed on contact isolation until they have been cleared. And of course we'll culture any suspected infection.

[NICU Guy, BSN, RN]

We do weekly MRSA swabs on all babies Sunday night/Mon. morning

[countyERNICU]

Thanks for the response!

[NicuGal, MSN, RN]

We stopped doing them about 6 months ago. Now we only do them if a kid has a positive mom, something oozy and goopy. When one shows up positive, we swab the room and go from there.

[katierobin23]

We swab nares of every baby on admission and every 2 weeks. Any baby that comes up positive is on contact precautions until discharge. Any baby whose mom was positive is also on contact until discharge, regardless of the baby's actual status.

[Jory, MSN, APRN, CNM]

We only do MRSA swabs in a couple situations -- babies born to mothers with a history of MRSA and babies coming to our unit from other hospitals (we send out for certain procedures and also accept patients from surrounding facilities). All of these patients are placed on contact isolation until they have been cleared. And of course we'll culture any suspected infection.

We do the same. I would like to see the evidence to support the expense of weekly swabs. Sounds like a waste of money to me.

[karnicurnc, MSN, APRN, CNS]

We do weekly surveillance swabs. If positive then infants are isolated until d/c. We recently had a large group (about 20%) of MRSA-colonized infants. We had to isolate, cohort, treat with bactroban, bathe with CHG (those that qualified) and then retest. The rest of our large hospital had stopped even testing patients; MRSA is everywhere and the infants are probably getting colonized from their own families! Very frustrated with this process. We aren't routinely treating the colonized infants so what good is knowing they are positive?

[crmathew]

This is so interesting. I have never heard of this before. We do MRSA swabs for babies that are coming in from an outside hospital or during a complete sepsis workup or with any other indicators like oozing etc. We were doing the same at my old hospital. The only other time we did them were when we suspected an outbreak because we had a few positive MRSA cultures. Weekly MRSA cultures sound like a waste of time and money to me.