The short answer to the above question is, “No.” In the hospital, everyone who comes in is tested by swabbing their nose for MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus) carriage. Somewhere in the vicinity of 1 in 3 otherwise healthy people are positive for growing this bug in their nose, and in an effort to limit the spread of infections associated with these pathogens, we don cumbersome gowns and take on and off latex gloves each time we enter the room.
It sounds like a reasonable idea, except that these barrier precautions have been shown to de-incentivize physicians and nurses to enter the room and visit patients, raising the possibility that patients could receive less attentive care because sometimes there is not enough time to gown up and visit the patient.
Secondly, if we’re honest with ourselves, putting on a goofy yellow gown is mostly there to convince ourselves that we’re doing something about infection control rather than actually preventing spread of bacteria. When we go into the hospital, bacteria are all over our shoes, lab coats, door handles, and surfaces. If we were real about limiting dangerous bugs, we’d have more systematic approaches to transmission, rather than programs that allow us to put smiley faces and frowns on whiteboards.
Lastly, and far and away most palm-to-face-ingly, we test all patients who enter the hospital for MRSA, but we don’t test healthcare workers ourselves for MRSA carriage. As healthcare workers, we have a far higher risk of growing MRSA, and similarly because we touch and interact with so many patients, we introduce a much higher risk of transmitting MRSA to our patients.
Why on earth then wouldn’t we test healthcare workers for MRSA, which would make far more sense than testing patients? The answer is that we don’t want to know, because if we did, we’d have to self-impose wearing those silly yellow robes all over the hospital.
