The Health Protection Agency is now publishing quarterly analyses on MRSA and Clostridium difficile rates. These make interesting reading. There has been good progress in reducing MRSA bacteraemias. For kidney services in 2008 beween July and September, the rate was 15 episodes representing 4.2% of all the episodes giving an incidence of 11.5 MRSA infections per 100,000 bed days. During the same 3 month period in 2009, infections had fallen to 8 (3.5% of the total) and incidence of 6.1 per 100,000 bed days. That’s good news but we shouldn’t be complacent. Kidney services remain with the highest rate of all specialities, zero tolerance needs to be maintained.
Clostridium difficile infection rates are also collected by the HPA. Again the rates have been falling over the last few years. For kidney services during the 3 month period July to September 2008 there were 107 episodes representing 2.7% of the total or an incidence of 8.2 Clostridium difficile infections per 10,000 bed days. This remained essentially unchanged at 105 episodes representing 4% of the total Cdiff infections FOR the corresponding period in 2009. This is the second highest rate for all specialties with critical care medicine where there is an incidence rate of 10.6 episodes per 10,000 bed days being the highest rates . For comparison general medicine and general surgery have rates of 4.5 per 10,000 bed days and 3.3 per 10,000 bed days respectively.
Full details are availabe by following this link which also gives dates of future publications of the monthly MRSA and Cdiff tables and the dates for quarterly analysis release.
