Q:What are you seeing in terms of MDRO prevalence?
A:There are no dashboards or national numbers for comparison but we have been following our hospital-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (HA-MRSA) infections since the beginning of time. We can tell where the numbers are increasing and which units are at higher risk, so based on our own historic data, we set out to determine where we would focus our efforts initially. We looked through all of our intensive care units (ICUs) and all of our patient-care areas for the locations that had the highest rate of hospital-acquired MRSA infections. Our interventions are based on our MRSA bundle, which consists primarily of active surveillance testing of the nares for MRSA, followed by contract droplet precautions, and diligence to hand hygiene and education. Once we were able to better identify the silent reservoir—those who are just colonized—and make sure the interventions and precautions were put into place, we saw fewer infections. Transmission of organisms was decreased; we were no longer passing the organism as readily. Before we identified the silent reservoir, we didn’t know people had the pathogen, so inadvertent transmission occurred. We experienced great success in our medical ICU, which is where we started
our efforts. After the first three years, we achieved an 85 percent reduction in our HA-MRSA rates.
