Kitty Cope is 87 years old. In 2001, she went into hospital for a hip replacement - significant surgery but now so common as to cause relatively little anxiety. But for Kitty, it was a nightmare.
An active bowls player, she hoped that her new hip would restore her mobility, which had been severely curtailed by arthritis. Instead, Kitty contracted MRSA (Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus), and had to have the new hip removed. She is now permanently disabled.
In a move for which many thousands of patients are likely to have cause to thank her, Kitty decided to sue the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, south Wales, where she had had her operation. Last month, after a four-year wait, Kitty made history.
Her case against the hospital was settled for what was described as a "substantial sum". But what made it unique was that the hospital acknowledged its share of responsibility for Kitty's MRSA, accepting that "there were some failings in relation to the care provided to Mrs Cope at the time".
One of the most difficult obstacles in the courts for victims of medical negligence is the business of proving causation, of conclusively showing that what happened to you was directly caused by the action or inaction of the hospital or doctor involved in your treatment.
You have ended up with a multiantibiotic-resistant hospital-born infection such as MRSA, but can you be absolutely certain what caused it? Was it a doctor who didn't wash his or her hands between patients, or a nurse? Parts of the hospital may not have looked that clean, but can you definitively say that it was this lack of hygiene that caused your infection? Perhaps it made its way into your bloodstream by way of contact with a visitor, or with items handled by other patients.
Or maybe you might have even given it to yourself. You may be one of the group (up to 30 per cent of the population) carrying the bug around harmlessly on your skin.
Until now, hospitals both here and in the UK have relied on this uncertainty to protect them against legal action from those with MRSA. Kitty Cope's action has moved us one step closer towards making hospitals legally responsible for these kinds of infections.
It is a sad truth that the now realistic threat of being sued by hundreds of MRSA victims may become the critical factor in forcing the health service in this country to take hospital-born infections seriously.
Hospitals remain reticent about their rates of MRSA, refusing to release figures willingly. That those statistics for individual hospitals published in yesterday's Irish Times had to be extracted by way of a Freedom of Information request is a disgrace. And even at that, a number of hospitals are still trying to wriggle out of revealing the extent of their problems.
It is particularly disappointing to see Beaumont Hospital in this category. In my experience of covering MRSA for over a decade, Beaumont was often the most upfront and honest of the hospitals, with medical staff believing that it was firmly in the national interest that the public be as fully informed as possible on both the incidence of hospital-born infection and the measures taken to control it. At a time when several of the country's major hospitals were refusing to admit that even a single one of their patients had ever contracted MRSA, Beaumont Hospital was leading the charge to force the health service to be open about the problem.
It is now widely accepted that multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria, classed generally as superbugs, arise in part due to over-prescription of antibiotics, which the bugs then learn to combat.
Studies comparing antibiotic prescription in Ireland to elsewhere have shown that, in addition to overuse, doctors here have a tendency to employ wide-spectrum drugs, as opposed to those specifically targeted at the particular infection.
Consequently, immunity has developed at a disturbing rate. For example, resistance to penicillin in Ireland is up to 25 per cent, compared to 5 per cent in the UK.
We now have the highest rate in Europe of MRSA per head of population - 119 cases per million, which is over twice the rate of any other country. And while the National Disease Surveillance Centre confirms that last year 553 people contracted MRSA in their bloodstreams - the most serious form - we are still not allowed to know how many people die of the infection each year.
It is long past time that the endemic secrecy surrounding MRSA and other hospital infections be ended.
Every hospital should release as a matter of course its rates of infection for each of the previous five years, the outcome for each patient (including deaths), together with their comprehensive plans to control the spread of a scourge, which, if not tackled urgently, could make going into hospital almost as dangerous as staying away.
mraftery@irish-times.ie