MRSA halved at St Vincent de Paul
Cases of the superbug MRSA at St Vincent de Paul Residence have more than halved from last year.
Forty-six cases were reported last year, dropping to 19 between January and November this year, Parliamentary Secretary Mario Galea said.
The news emerges after the head of the National Antibiotic Committee, Michael Borg last month flagged a completely different situation at the Mater Dei Hospital.
Dr Borg had said that, overall, hand hygiene had barely improved with the migration to the new hospital despite better hand-washing facilities and the availability of alcohol rubs.
Hand hygiene among medics at Mater Dei was taking place only 30 per cent of the time, just slightly higher than the compliance rate at St Luke's Hospital.
At St Vincent de Paul Residence, however, Mr Galea reported a much better situation, saying that other communicable diseases have also gone down to 18 infections this year compared to 36 last year.
Infections within the residence had decreased due to more awareness and measures being taken by the residence's infection control unit.
Speaking at the end of a conference organised by the unit, Mr Galea said the way forward was to encourage more nursing staff to specialise and undertake ongoing training programmes.
1 Comment
Post comment
Please sign in or create your Account to post comments.
Richard Bartolo
Dec 4th 2008, 22:46
The infection control unit and health care workers at St Vincent de Paul is to be commended for such an achievement. I agree with Mario Galea that ongoing education for staff is one of the key elements to render safer hospitals. But to achieve better hand hygiene compliance, hence reduce infection rates a multifaceted approach is required accompanied by adequate recourses within the health service.
Adequate resources would ensure other requirements such as ongoing promotion of hand hygiene practices via a range of communication and promotional tools, active participation and feedback at both individual and organization levels, involvement of institutional leaders and most importantly collection and feedback of several standardised outcome measures such as, hand hygiene compliance rates and rates of MRSA disease including bacteraemia and MRSA separations.