[EurSafety Health-Net: MRSA Eradication in Nursing Homes and Home Care - A Practice Report]

In 2009 the project EurSafety Health-Net, funded by Interreg IVa, was initiated in order to create a cross-border quality alliance to enhance patient safety in the field of infectious diseases. Within this framework, several studies and projects addressing key topics of infection control were carried out. We describe the two-year project "MRSA decolonisation in care settings (MSP)", which aimed at evaluating a simple and economic way of decolonisation of non-hospitalised MRSA carriers in 2 districts in Lower Saxony. In the course of the project 181 decolonisations of MRSA carriers were performed by nursing homes and nursing services for outpatients in cooperation with the local public health authorities of the districts Ammerland and Grafschaft Bentheim. Of 181 cases 134 were eligible for statistical analysis. The project provided protocols for 2 different starting situations: 1) Continuing and completing a decolonisation treatment subsequent to a hospital stay by nursing services for outpatients or in a nursing home. 2) Starting a decolonisation treatment in a nursing home or by nursing services for outpatients. The carriers were provided with the required materials either by the hospitals (situation 1) or by the local public health authorities (situation 2) free of charge. The decolonisation treatment and the testing were offered only to carriers free of properties deemed as decolonisation obstacles and was applied without involvement of the general practitioner. Short- and long-term success of the 5 day decolonisation treatment was tested afterwards by two swabs (14 days and 6 months after the end of the treatment). The results of the 6-month control swabs showed that 45% of the carriers were successfully decolonised in the long term. All parties involved regarded the procedure of the MSP project as effective with respect to the target. Thus, even after the project was finished, both districts continued applying the MSP protocol.