Thoughts on MRSA

The ER serves a large population of people that have a history of MRSA, most of them the community acquired strain which causes the epidemic of abscesses we are currently dealing with.

When you are in the hospital and you are known to have a drug resistant organism you are put on isolation. That means you are expected to stay in your room, except when leaving to go to a diagnostic test, and people entering the room wear a protective gown and gloves which are removed when they leave the room. This is to keep the organism being spread from room to room, patient to patient, on our hands and clothing.

The ER is a little different. These people come in and sit in the lobby with everyone else, the use the public bathroom. They sit in the triage room (which is never cleaned as far as I can tell) in the same chair that everyone else uses. Then when they come back to a room they get put on isolation. I dunno, to me that just makes no sense at all.

I don't know how it is at other hospitals but anywhere I have ever worked housekeeping is pretty poor. The public has an idea of hospitals as gleaming clean but that is just not the case. The truth is, in an effort to make as much money as possible, most hospitals hire the fewest housekeepers possible and pay them minimum wage with no benefits. What you get in return is a revolving door of people who are working there because they can't get another job at the moment and move on as soon as possible. While they are there there is no real incentive to do a good job. They are overwhelmed by the amount of cleaning they are supposed to do daily, there is no way that one person could do it, so they just do what they can, and it is never enough. If you look closely, you'll see grime in the corners, dust on the ceiling vents, the tops of the furniture wiped, but the sides and bottoms grimy. Floor waxing, which should be done quarterly, done once a year or less. Have you ever seen the chairs in the waiting room wiped down? I didn't think so.

But I'll bet the executive offices are clean.