- Meeting abstract
- Open access
- Published:
MRSA screening in emergency department detects a minority of MRSA carriers
Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine volume 23, Article number: A30 (2015)
Background
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is an emerging problem in Denmark. The National Board of Health (NBH) has issued a screening tool to identify risk situations for admitted patients, consisting of three parts: questions concerning general risk situations, special risk situations, and individual risk factors. All patients should answer the general risk situation questions, the special risk, and risk factor on indication and be tested for MRSA if a risk situation is identified. Since the majority of all acute patients are admitted to the emergency departments (ED), the ED plays a key role in prevention of in-hospital spreading of MRSA. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of MRSA among all acutely admitted ED patients and to evaluate the ability of the NBH screening tool to detect MRSA patients.
Methods
All patients more than 10 years, acutely admitted to the ED in the Hospital of Southern Jutland during a three months period were requested to answer all the NBH questions and a nasal and pharyngeal swab was obtained for MRSA culture.
Results
1,945 patients above 10 years were admitted, 1,660 patients (85%) were asked to participate and 1,220 accepted (63% of all admissions). 11 patients had MRSA (0.9%). The performance of the general risk situation screening to detect MRSA carriers was: sensitivity 18% (95% CI: 2-52%), specificity 96% (94-97%), positive predictive value (PPV) 4% (0.4-12%) and negative predictive value (NPV) 99% (99-99.6%), likelihood ratio for positive test (LHR+) 4.0 (1-14) and likelihood ratio for negative test LHR(-) 0.9 (0.7-1.1). For the combined general, specific, and individual risk factors the sensitivity was 46% (17-77%), specificity 60% (57-63%) PPV 1% (0.3-2.4%) NPV 99% ( 98-99.7%), LHR (+) 1.1 (0.6-2) and LHR (-) 0.9 (0.5-1.6).
Conclusion
In this ED 0.9% of the patients had MRSA. Less than every fifth will be detected by the general screening questions and less than half if all general, specific, and individual questions are used. We conclude that the majority of MRSA carriers acutely admitted to the ED will remain undetected.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Mogensen, C.B., Kjældgaard, P., Skov, L.Ø. et al. MRSA screening in emergency department detects a minority of MRSA carriers. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med 23 (Suppl 1), A30 (2015). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1757-7241-23-S1-A30
Published:
DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1757-7241-23-S1-A30