Controlling antibiotic resistance in the hospital environment

Published on December 31, 2009 Reviewed on July 24, 2015   39 min

A selection of talks on Microbiology

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0:00
This talk is titled Controlling Antibiotic Resistance in the Hospital Environment. My name is Dr. Ian Eltringham, and I'm a Medical Microbiologist and Infection Control doctor, working at a large teaching hospital in London. In this talk, I will aim to describe the problem of antibiotic resistance in a healthcare setting, and explore ways of controlling it. Brief references are provided to encourage students to access some source data where appropriate.
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Surveys of antibiotic resistance have shown wide temporal and geographic variation in antibiotic-resistant organism rates. For instance, MRSA was first described in the UK in 1961, but the first clinical isolates in the United States were not seen until 1968. Typically, rates vary between healthcare institutions, clinical specialties, and even between individual wards within a given hospital. The highest rates are usually seen in critical care facilities, and among immunocompromised patients, but much depends on the age of the population being studied. For instance, point prevalence studies conducted by the United States Pediatric Prevention Network in 2002 showed MRSA colonization in less than 4% of pediatric ICU patients, whereas 10 to 24% carried ceftazidime or aminoglycoside resistant gram-negative bacilli. This contrasts sharply with a 2003 National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance data, which shows 60% of Staph aureus isolate from adult ICU patients to be MRSA. In the same study, the percentage of enterococcal isolates from ICUs that were resistant to vancomycin was 28.5%.

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Controlling antibiotic resistance in the hospital environment

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