WKRG.com » News Stream » Medical »

MRSA Attack Plan

By Medstar

Published: Tue, November 13, 2007 - 10:42 am Last Updated: Tue, November 13, 2007 - 6:38 pm

Short URL: http://wkrg.com/a/6859/

After breast cancer surgery, Donna Shinn had another battle on her hands, the drug-resistant superbug, MRSA.
"I just know that i was in a private room and just outside my room they had a special sink and everything, for everyone to wash down before they came in to see me."
The precautions are part of 'positive deviance' a stepped up attack plan on the superbug.
"In the hospitals that have had the most experience with positive deviance, we've seen declines on the order of 50%."
P-d is based on the principle that solutions to problems already exist. The idea is to engage everyone from housekeepers to lab workers to put that knowledge into practice.
"It becomes their job then to look among their colleagues to find out the good practices that are achieving better results. So it's kind of finding what's working and then doing more of it."
"What has changed here really has been the ground swell of involvement and the engagement that we've been able to get in this staff."
At Johns Hopkins, the P-D campaign is called "stomp" for stop transmission of MRSA permanently.
"We're pushing hand hygiene. We're getting 'em, you know, alcohol gels all over the place. wash your hands."
"We've also taken a number of steps to try to decrease transmission coming into the hospital. We're requiring all visitors to wash their hands with the chlorhexadine, the purell wash before entering the unit."
Incoming high-risk patients are swabbed for the MRSA germ. If a test is positive, the lab can immediately page the floor nurse to put the patient in isolation.
"We are looking into new forms of environmental decontamination to take place, you know, in the unit once the patients that are at high risk or who are infected have left those rooms to try to decontaminate those rooms better."
Posters keep the program's progress front and center while the entire staff bones up on infection control with an in-house version of jeopardy. But is this "all out" effort cutting MRSA infections?
"We used to have a fairly, one of the highest transmission rates in the hospital of any ICU and we have actually decreased that significantly."
Proving positive deviance gives positive results.

Fast Facts:
In 2005, there were 94,360 reported infections with the super bug, MRSA. 18,650 people died from the infection.
MRSA is resistant to a group of common antibiotics, like methicillin, penicillin, amoxicillin and oxacillin.
Once a MRSA infection takes hold, it can lead to a serious infection of the skin, surgical site, bone, lung, urinary tract or bloodstream.
An aggressive prevention and identification program, called Positive Deviance, may decrease rates of MRSA infection in the hospital by up to 80 percent.