Link: Surveillance program leads to plunge in hospital MRSA rates | battlecreekenquirer.com | The Enquirer.
Now the second-year infection control coordinator for the 94-bed hospital, Walkinshaw is a strong proponent of active surveillance among ICU patients, having seen the successful results of efforts applied by her department when it teamed up with the hospital’s ICU team to implement an active surveillance program among patients in the four-bed unit.
“My purpose was to see how bad the MRSA situation really was out there,” she said, reflecting on the program she ran in 2007. MRSA rates were “pretty bad,” she recalled. “About 62% of our ICU patients proved positive for community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) when we started the program.”
For nine months in 2007, patients admitted from either the Emergency Department or physicians’ offices, or inpatients transferred to the ICU were tested for MRSA via nasal swab. When the surveillance program concluded, CA-MRSA rates had dropped by 16 percentage points to 46%, she said.
High MRSA rates and their ultimate decline convinced Walkinshaw to use hand hygiene as a basis for a huge infection prevention campaign that continues to this day.
