It is good to hear of someone suing an NHS hospital over MRSA. One of the great scandals of the NHS, as detailed in The Welfare State We're In, has been it dreadful record in combating infection and MRSA in particular. The NHS's record is very dramatically worse than that of the private sector - a fact which I have never seen anyone else report.
The story reported below is reminiscent of the famous case in medical history in which women giving birth were mysteriously dying in alarming numbers at a particular hospital (in Vienna, perhaps?). No one could work out why the women were dying. Some women no longer wanted to have their babies in this hospital but preferred to take their chances at home. Going to the hospital came to be seen as dangerous. Finally a doctor worked out that the mothers were being examined by medical students who had previously been working in the hospital's mortuary. The students were infecting the mothers and, effectively, killing them. So washbowls were installed outside the ward and all the students were required to wash before entering. The death rate fell. That was a very long time ago. Yet we now have a woman who goes into hospital perfectly healthy. She, too, comes out dead because she became infected in the place that was meant to help her. I wish Mr Espaba well in his suit. The hospital might claim that it followed procedures. That is not good enough. The NHS has 'form' when it comes to MRSA.
The husband of a nurse who died from a virulent strain of MRSA six days after giving birth said yesterday he was suing the hospital at the centre of the outbreak.Maribel Espaba, 33, died at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire after contracting Panton-Valentine Leukocidin-producing MRSA after an emergency caesarean in September.
Mrs Espaba is one of 11 people connected to the UHNS who have caught the infection, which destroys white blood cells and can kill within 24 hours.
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Nine members of the medical staff and two patients, one of whom died in March, have also been infected.Yesterday Mrs Espaba's husband, Wen 30, said: "I am absolutely heartbroken. It was the worst and best time of my life. My wife had just given birth to our beautiful baby boy and then just days later she had died.
"It was all very sudden. We had just moved into our new house and were looking forward to our new life with our son. Only a couple of days after she came out of hospital she suddenly fell very ill.
"She was rushed into the hospital but her condition just kept deteriorating. I was helpless and I could see she was dying.
"When the doctors told me she had died I was numb. I had no idea why she had died. They never mentioned MRSA and they had not mentioned to my wife that there had been an outbreak of MRSA even though she worked at the hospital."
He added: "Maribel was a strong and happy person who was dedicated to her work and was always helpful. I was very dependent upon her support and have found it extremely difficult to cope. "This was our first child and the only comfort I have is that Maribel got to see him and spent six days with him before her death."
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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Perhaps we should sue pathogens for evolving.
You will need more than the old "choice and competition" mantra to combat antibiotic resistance. Please acquaint yourself with the facts before using such tragedies to bash the NHS. If all UK healthcare was privatised tomorrow, C.Diff, MRSA (PVL or otherwise) et al would still be a significant & growing problem - especially given the elderly/vulnerable deomgraphic (the private sector, at present, does not have to deal with anything like the present "caseload" of the NHS - hence simple private vs. public comparisons are rather meaningless). Besides, who exactly do you think will be staffing your private hospitals?
God knows, there are certainly things you can "throw money at" in the interests of successful infection control (i.e. decent staffing ratios, isolation capacity etc etc ) - but it's not an issue well served by either tabloid headlines or political hype. As far as I'm concerned, using MRSA as a reason why one should avoid paying taxes to fund public healthcare reflects a particular political agenda - rather than a considered understanding of the science involved. Many healthy people carry MRSA as part of their habitual "skin flora" - swab yourself, you (& many Daily Mail readers) might be in for a surprise.
I doubt that you will publish this, as it does not fit your thesis (indeed, I care only that you read it... & I apologise for my ill-mannered comments, but this sort of thing angers me intensely). Again I quote a useful summary from 'Jacques_Bustard', cf. the British Army Rumour Service (www.arrse.co.uk), thus:
"The incidence of hospital acquired infection (HAI) and MRSA has had little to do with which party is in power. The causes of all HAI is complex and muti-factorial and there will never be an infection free healthcare system, its just not possible. It is possible to reduce risks as far as possible and there is a reasonable amount of clinical evidence around how achieve this. It is not as simple as just saying clean the hospitals all this will go away. Indeed I recently had a paper published in the Journal of Hospital Infection which examined cleanliness scores for individual hospitals (as published by the Department of Health) and MRSA bacteraemia rates (again using DH data) and found no correlation between the two. Indeed whilst cleanliness has apparently improved there was no statistically significant decrease in MRSA bacteraemia rates. Hospitals should be clean but preventing MRSA, Clostridium difficile and many other HAIs requires much more science and a lot less politics and media hype. Both MRSA and Clostridium difficile have been rising since the early 1990s and have continued since, i.e. both under the Tories and Labour."
It has become a political football of the very worst kind.
Posted by: lost_nurse at December 24, 2006 03:14 PM
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Yes, but who will pay?
Will anyone lose their job? Will patients be able to go elsewhere?
The taxpayer will pay the cost of settling any claim.
Nobody loses apart from the patient and the taxpayer.
Another example of how the NHS lacks the incentives necessary to improve.
Posted by: HJHJ at December 22, 2006 07:51 PM