Article
MRSA rates of 53 German hospitals in relation to their screening frequency
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Published: | September 6, 2007 |
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Background: MRSA is one of the most relevant resistant pathogens. The German national nosocomial surveillance infection system (KISS) established a hospital based prospective surveillance system for MRSA to calculate the reference data for Germany. However, the MRSA rates are dependent on the hospitals screeening activities.
Objective: To determine the MRSA rates according to the screening activities of German hospitals.
Methods: KISS prepared a surveillance protocol and a standardised case report form for MRSA-KISS. The participating hospitals are spread all over Germany. The data were recorded during the routine surveillance by the infection control team of each hospital. Screening for MRSA carriage was mainly performed using nose cultures. The number of nose cultures was received from the microbiology and calculated per 1000 patient days.
Results: Data from 101 hospitals, 10,647 MRSA case-patients with 180,158 MRSA patient days and with 14,409,799 patient days were analysed for the year 2005. 6,744 (63.3%) patients of the total number of MRSA case-patients were colonized with MRSA and 4,016 (37.7%) had a MRSA infection. 7,053 (66.2%) were imported and 3,707 (34.8%) were nosocomial. The number of nose cultures was recorded in 53 hospitals. These data per 1000 patient days were stratified into four categories according to the different MRSA-rates.
Conclusion: The amount of screening samples of a hospital should be considered to evaluate MRSA rates. Recording the number of nose cultures per 1,000 patient days seems to be a good method for reflecting the actual screening policies of each individual hospital. So the stratification according to the frequency of nose culture screening will become a routine method in MRSA-KISS.