Hospital Compensation Claims Likely to Increase Following New MRSA Outbreak

Hygiene in medical centres across Ireland will come under fresh scrutiny with the announcement that a new strain of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been discovered in two Dublin hospitals. MRSA is bacteria which enter the bloodstream through cuts, surgical wounds and invasive devices such as catheters or implanted feeding tubes, causing infection to hospital patients with weak immune systems. Difficulties exist treating these infections, as MRSA are resistant to penicillin based antibiotics and, although some MRSA infections manifest as boils or abscesses, MRSA may cause pneumonia, endocarditis (inflammation of the heart chambers) and septicaemia (blood poisoning).
A report published in 2010 entitled “MRSA in Ireland” revealed that patients who contract MRSA infections in Irish hospitals are seven times more likely to die in hospital than those that do not have secondary infections.
The report further disclosed that secondary MRSA infections meant that patients spent on average an extra 11 days in hospital, costing the Health Service Executive (HSE) more than 23 million Euros each year.
By law, doctors have to report any MRSA infection to the HSE, and statistics produced by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre have shown that as many as 2,500 patients per year contract MRSA blood stream infections in Irish hospitals.
Alarmingly, doctors are not obliged to disclose if an MRSA infection is a contributory factor in a patient´s death and, based on international fatality levels throughout Europe, it is possible that as many as 250 deaths in Ireland per year are directly attributable to a hospital acquired MRSA infection.
Now that a new strain of MRSA has been discovered – that was so different that existing test kits could not recognise it as being an MRSA-type bacterium – new treatments will have to be found to counter the illnesses and deaths caused by the bacteria.
It is claimed in the medical journals “Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy” and the “Lancet Infectious Diseases” that the organism can share its genetic make-up and its antibiotic resistance with other bacteria. This raises the fears of a new generation of superbugs that hospitals will have no answer to. Only through improved standards of hygiene and public awareness will hospitals and other medical centres be able to prevent a new epidemic of MRSA, and the claims for compensation which will inevitably follow.