The head of a Galway MRSA support group will today lead a fact-finding mission to Wales where a doctor has succeeded in reducing the spread of the highly-contagious infection in hospitals by 60 per cent.
Tony Kavanagh co-ordinates a number of MRSA groups around the country and is keen for Irish hospitals to learn from the practices being implemented in Wales.
He will be joined on the visit by members of the central council of MRSA and Families, along with Senator Fergal Brown of Fine Gael. Today they will meet with the chief executive officer of the Cardiff and Vale Health Trust and consultant microbiologist Ian Hosein.
Dr Hosein is the first director of Infection Prevention and Control in the UK, and has direct responsibility for nine hospitals, 1,600 beds and 10,000 staff.
Over the past four years he has reduced the MRSA infection rate by 60 per cent.
Many people can be carriers of MRSA without showing any ill- effects themselves. Normally people only suffer serious illness as a result of the bug when their systems are immunocompromised, such as when they are in hospital having an operation.
Mr Kavanagh, a resident of Tuam, says the aim of their visit is to gather evidence-based information to support their submission to the Dáil Committee on Health in October.
The head of the Galway group is an advocate of Dr Hosein's techniques and attitude towards the spread of MRSA. Dr Hosein believes that it is human behaviour that allows the infection to spread.
"It's what everybody does, from the consultant to the cleaner, that matters," according to Dr Hosein.
Instead of managing the infection when an outbreak occurs in hospitals, Dr Hosein changed the focus to outright prevention.
He began studying staff and became a proponent of management and staff working together as a team on the prevention of MRSA infection.
The Galway branch of the MRSA support group was formed in June and now has over 125 members. "We get people calling us all the time with horrific stories," said Mr Kavanagh.
He contracted MRSA following a simple operation in a Dublin hospital in 2004. "After I was discharged I began to feel a burning sensation in my legs. I could literally feel the infection going through my bloodstream. I was digging my fingernails into the wall with pain."
He believes that MRSA is rampant in every Irish hospital.
A research project presented at the annual meeting of the Irish College of General Practitioners in Galway in May showed that nearly 8 per cent of GPs studied in the west of Ireland were found to be carrying the MRSA bug in their nasal passages.
Mr Kavanagh says hand hygiene and infection-prevention guidelines must be fully implemented in Irish hospitals if the problem is to be significantly tackled.
"It's human behaviour that is allowing this highly-contagious infection to spread."
Mr Kavanagh and the MRSA support group first made a submission to the Dáil committee in November.
He is hoping that the information they bring back from their visit to Wales will be enough to force the Government into action and to implement similar tactics as used by Dr Hosein in preventing the spread of MRSA.