Numbers of C-diff cases are falling

The figures were revealed at Thursday’s meeting of the Trust Board held at Altnagelvin Hospital.

Dermot Hughes, medical director, delivering the infection prevention and control update and quality improvement monitoring report, said there were fewer cases than last year and year on year they were seeing more and more decreases.

However, he also revealed that 34 of these cases were health care associated and said that many cases of C-Diff were not avoidable.

“Regionally we have slightly more cases than the Southern Trust, but we have less cases than other Trusts and this figures continues to improve. People are given broad spectrum antibiotics when they are very sick. There is a greater demand for these and C-Diff is often a non-avoidable complication of this treatment”

The Trust medical director said they have no cases of transfer of C-Diff between patients and this has not happened for several years.

Turning his attention to MRSA, he revealed that the Trust had seven cases of MRSA Bacteraemia.

“This is an exceptionally rare condition,” he said. “With every individual case we carry out a root cause analysis.”

Mr. Hughes said more housekeeping needed to be done to ensure all audits are submitted by wards.