NSW hospital patients most at risk of contracting infections
Sydney hospital patients are more likely to contract lethal infections than elsewhere in Australia, but the state government says publishing hospital-by-hospital results would be counterproductive.
A report in the Sydney Morning Herald recently, said that an analysis of golden staph specimens isolated in patients in NSW and the ACT has found the patients are 25% more likely to have a life-threatening drug-resistant version of the bug.
The study was published late last year in the Federal Health Department’s Communicable Disease Intelligence journal based on the most recent available evidence, collected in 2005, on the prevalence of the bug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
An infectious disease expert at the Australian National University, Peter Collignon, said the figures indicated NSW hospitals had an inferior performance on infection control and insufficient isolation facilities such as single rooms for infectious patients.
MRSA occurring in the bloodstream is estimated to trigger about 700 deaths a year in Australia, about half of which would be preventable, Professor Collignon said.
The evidence from England, Western Australia and South Australia showed that where hospital infection figures were routinely collected and published, infection rates were significantly lower, driven partly by public pressure to improve performance.
