Hospital Safety: Wearing Gowns and Gloves Helps Prevent MRSA

In the hospital, doctors like to suit up before they go into battle.

In other words, to better protect themselves and others from infection, it's required that health professionals wear disposable gowns and gloves in order to prevent the possibility of catching certain sicknesses that could cause them to get sick and miss work, or worse.

And a recent study shows the importance of such safety measures in order to prevent the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

MRSA, an infection that's caused by a strain of staph bacteria that's become resistant to the antibiotics that are commonly used to treat ordinary staph infections, is mostly seen in individuals who have been in hospitals or other health care settings, including nursing homes and dialysis centers over a long period of time.

The study showed that health care workers who wore the aforementioned protective gear upon entering patient's rooms in an ICU helped reduce the risk of MRSA by up to 40 percent.

The use of both gowns and gloves also increased the frequency of hand washing among all other health care workers. However, researchers note that the study did not statistically show any significant results for preventing problems for patients with another common bacteria known as vancomycin-resistant Enteroccus (VRE).

 "We set out to find whether having healthcare workers wear gowns and gloves for all ICU patient contact could decrease the acquisition of antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA without causing any harm to the patient - and the answer was yes," said the study's principal investigator, Anthony D. Harris, M.D., MPH, professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, via a press release.

The study examined 20 surgical and medical ICUs across 15 states, as well as 92,000 cultures from over 26,000 patients during a nine-month period in 2012. The ICUs involved via the study were randomly assigned to either an intervention or control group. 

"Infection control studies such as this are important to advance the science and lead to important discoveries that can decrease health care-associated infections," said Daniel J. Morgan, M.D., M.S., the study's senior author and assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, via the release. "In conjunction with the evolution of hospital cleaning practices, increased hand washing frequency and other measures, patients in hospitals can be safer than they've ever been from HAIs."

The research is co-led by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Yale New Haven Health System Center for Healthcare Solutions.