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StaphAseptic™ News
Study shows sharing a hospital room increases risk of picking up infections
January 11, 2010
The Canadian Press
Sharing a hospital room increases your risk of picking up an infection during your stay, a new study shows.
The work, by researchers from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., found that each new roommate raised a patient's risk of picking up an infection in hospital by about 10 per cent.
"If you're in a two, three or four-bedded room, each time you get a new roommate your risk of acquiring these serious infections increases by 10 per cent," Dr. Dick Zoutman, senior author of the study and an infection control expert at Kingston General Hospital, said in a statement.
"That's a substantial risk, particularly for longer hospital stays when you can expect to have many different roommates."
Previous studies have shown that rates of hospital infections are higher in multi-bed settings than when patients are housed one to a room.
But few studies have actually looked at whether the number of roommates you have in hospital increases your risk of developing a hospital-acquired infection.
In this work, the researchers looked at whether there was a relationship between the number of roommates patients had and whether they became infected with any of three important hospital germs during their stay.
The bugs studied were C. difficile, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and another superbug, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus. The increase per roommate was 11 per cent for C. difficile and VRE and 10 per cent for MRSA.
This is a portion of the original article. To read the entire article, visit telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com
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