Newcastle’s Calvary Mater hospital has recorded the country’s highest rate of golden staph infections according to a new report.
The National Health Performance Authority has released details showing the Mater had 19 cases of the potentially deadly infection in 2012-13, the highest rate per patient of any Australian hospital.
Director of Clinical Services, Nursing – Ailsa Hawkins, says the results are concerning but efforts are already underway to address the problem.
“We’ve looked at each case individually and we’ve come up with a number of strategies to help minimise the risk to patients,” she said.
“We focused our attention firstly on hand hygiene and our strategy now is to improve our asepsis training of our staff and the management of our intravenous cannula.”
She says she is confident that since the latest data was collected, rates of infection will have improved.
We need to be extra vigilant, we are identified as a facility that has vulnerable patients so our staff have to be hyper-vigilant in caring for all our patients that they don’t put them at risk of infection.
We think we’ve put a number of things in place now that should help alleviate those concerns.
According to the report Newcastles John Hunter Hospital had 45 cases during the 12 month period.
Its rate of infection per patient was slightly above the average for major of hospitals of a similar size.