The Importance of Nurses in the Fight Against MRSA
Leslie L Luhr
University of Wyoming
The Importance of Nurses in the Fight Against MRSA
For any healthcare professional working in today’s environments, it is next to impossible to be unaware of MRSA’s popularity in the media and the prevalence of it in the U.S. This once was a disease people thought only affect patients with weak immune systems or hospitalized patients, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mutated into a pathogen that is happening more and more often in the younger healthier people. Nurses deal with this bug on a daily basis. This has been a growing issue in the hospitals and communities all over the world. So what can nurses to do prevent and control MRSA outbreaks in the hospital settings as well as in the community? The main ideas compiled from multiple sources are as follows: Hand washing correctly and more often, correctly administering antibiotics, MRSA screening of patients, and patient education. With keeping these concepts fresh on the mind of all the healthcare staff the management of MRSA will be improved.
Let’s begin with some important background information about Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Staphylococcus aureus derives its name from its appearance under a microscope, where it is seen as a Gram-positive coccus (sphere) that forms clusters (staphylococcus) with golden (aureus) colonies when cultured on an agar Plate (Barnes & Jinks, 2008). S. aureus is highly adaptive and is a normal micro biota for human and there for the reservoir of these bacteria are humans. If the S. aureus strain responsible for the infection demonstrates antimicrobial resistance when cultured in the laboratory, it is given the title MRSA (Barnes & Jinks, 2008). MRSA is now resistant to all but a few antimicrobial agents, hence why treating MRSA infections is difficult, and to compound matters it appears that multiple resistance is greatest where levels of...