The Republic has no national surveillance system for measuring the extent of healthcare-associated infections, which is "a major gap" in our efforts to bring infection rates under control, a specialist with the Health Protection Surveillance Centre has said.
Dr Robert Cunney said a crucial first step in controlling infections in hospitals was collecting good data and being able to act on it.
He told The Irish Times that while latest surveillance centre figures indicate there were 592 cases of MRSA bloodstream infections detected in Irish hospitals last year, up from 553 the year before, this was just an estimate because of the lack of a proper surveillance system.
Figures for hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA, Clostridium difficile and VRE released by individual hospitals to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published today, indicate MRSA bloodstream infections are being detected in almost all hospitals, large and small, and also in the children's hospitals as well as in maternity hospitals.
Crumlin and Temple Street children's hospitals, for example, each treated two children with MRSA bloodstream infections in 2005, while the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street treated three patients with such infections last year.
Dublin's Beaumont Hospital, which achieved some of the worst marks in the recent national hygiene audit, refused to release data on its infection rates. It said it was refusing the information on the grounds that such data, while of broad international value when aggregated at a national level, is severely flawed when used for the purpose of inter-hospital comparisons.
"This would provide a seriously misleading picture and could be expected to severely prejudice the effectiveness of our own testing and have an adverse impact on the performance of the hospital in relation to management of staff," it said.
The only hospital to seek a significant fee for the information was Mayo General Hospital. It said the information was not readily available and it sought a search and retrieval fee of €733.25. The Irish Times decided not to pay the fee.
Dr Kevin Kelleher, assistant national director of population health/health protection with the HSE, said last night the executive was not happy with the current infection rates and had devised a three-year €15 million programme to address the problem by putting in place a proper surveillance system, more infection control staff, and conducting education campaigns. But no funding was provided for it in the Estimates.
The HSE, he said, then allocated funding from its own budget for the programme because it saw it as a priority but ran into problems with staff recruitment due to the Government cap on recruitment in the public service. "Senior management have been in discussions with the Department of Health about that . . . we are now hoping in the next few weeks to get approval to go ahead."