Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many hospital-borne cases of MRSA were recorded in England in (a) 2000, (b) 2005, (c) 2010 and (d) 2015.

In April 2013 Public Health England took over the surveillance of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteraemia, formerly undertaken by the Health Protection Agency. We do not hold the data for 2000 and 2005.

Cases are published according to both trust apportionment and trust assignment. For the purpose of answering this question trust apportionment or assignment can be considered as “hospital borne” cases.

The assignment process was added to the MRSA surveillance in 2013 superseding the previously used apportionment method. The assignment process utilises individual case review and therefore allows for a much more considered categorisation of a case and associated learning to prevent similar cases occurring in the future, than was previously possible. The assignment process was only introduced in 2013 as MRSA numbers were previously considered to be too high to make this resource demanding method viable.

The total number of trust apportioned and trust assigned cases are displayed in Tables 1 and 2 respectively.

Table 1: Trust apportioned counts of MRSA bacteraemia in 2008, 2010 and 2015.

Table 2: Trust assigned counts of MRSA bacteraemia in 2015.

Notes:

1. Cases are published on a financial year basis.
2. Trust apportioned data are not available for the years 2000 and 2005.
3. Trust assigned are not available for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010.
4. Cases are deemed to be Trust apportioned if the following criteria are met:-

- The location where the specimen was taken is given as ‘acute trust’ or is not known;

- The patient was either an ‘In-patient’, ‘Day-patient’, in ‘Emergency assessment’ or is not known.

- Patient’s specimen date is on, or after, the third day of the admission (or admission date is null), where the day of admission is day 1.

5. Cases are deemed to be trust assigned on the basis of Post Infection Review (PIR) assignment and relevant cases are assigned to acute trusts.
6. The trust assignment method supersedes the apportionment one post 2013 and utilises case review by the teams caring for the patient.