The fear factor
Why is that people in the UK are so worried about infections like MRSA when it comes to healthcare?
Could it be that the media has an important part to play? A study by health analysts, the King’s Fund, shines some illuminating light on why we may be more fearful than people in other developed countries.
The King’s Fund looked at a decade’s worth (1997-2007) of the top six US newspapers for stories about MRSA – Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. And compared that with a decade’s worth of stories in the top six UK newspapers.
The results speak volumes. In the US there were 177 stories about MRSA over a 10 year period. That’s roughly one MRSA story every month. In the UK there were more then 4,300 stories over the same period. Or more than one MRSA story every single day.
That fear factor clearly has a big influence on people’s perceptions. We offer tours of the hospital to local schools and colleges and we often ask the students how many of our patients they think had an MRSA infection.
The answer they generally give is between a third and half of our patients. At the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital half of our in-patients and day case patients would equate to 72,286 patients a year with MRSA.
The reality is that last year (2009/10) we had only eight hospital-acquired cases of MRSA out of the 144,573 in-patients we treated. That is still eight too many and we are determined to do everything to minimise the risk of avoidable infection but it highlights the huge gap between the perception and reality.
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