Preventing MRSA

Each bold heading below links to a fuller guide to that policy.

• Hand hygiene — Washing or sanitising hands at the right moments removes MRSA before it reaches a wound, a device or another person. No other prevention measure has a bigger effect for less effort.
• Covered wounds — MRSA leaves the body in wound fluid and pus. A clean, dry, intact dressing keeps the organism inside the dressing rather than on hands, clothing, furniture and other people.
• Don't share personal items — MRSA survives on fabric, plastic and metal for days to weeks. Shared towels, razors, bar soap and sports gear move it directly from one person's skin to another's.
• Screening and contact precautions — Finding MRSA carriers on admission and managing them with gowns, gloves and single rooms stops silent carriage becoming ward-wide transmission.
• Disinfection of high-touch surfaces — Bed rails, door handles, taps, phones, keyboards and remote controls are touched dozens of times an hour. Cleaning them on a schedule removes the reservoir hands keep returning to.
• Antimicrobial stewardship — Every unnecessary antibiotic course selects for resistant organisms. Stewardship — right drug, right dose, right duration, or none at all — reduces the pressure that lets MRSA thrive.

These measures work as a bundle rather than in isolation: screening without decolonisation, or contact precautions without reliable hand hygiene, produce far weaker results than the whole set applied together. Limiting unnecessary antibiotic exposure reduces the selective pressure that favours resistant organisms — stewardship programmes have been associated with measurable declines in MRSA bacteraemia in every system that has run them.