We go to the hospital to get better from a serious illness or injury, not to get even sicker or put our lives at risk. Unfortunately, a stay at many Louisiana hospitals can put you at real risk of MRSA, a serious and potentially fatal infection. This is often the result of negligence from doctors and hospital staff who fail to reasonably protect their patients — with tragic results.
What is MRSA?
MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s a type of staph infection that most often enters the skin through wounds, including minor ones like pimples, cuts and bug bites. While MRSA is generally minor in healthy people, it can be dangerous for people in poor health — such as those staying in the hospital. And MRSA is resistant to antibiotics due to decades of doctors overprescribing them for minor illnesses, so it can be challenging to treat. It can be fatal in extreme cases.
How a hospital can become a MRSA breeding ground
MRSA infections among hospital patients are so common that they have their own name: healthcare-associated MRSA, or HA-MRSA. Hospitals owe their patients a duty of due care to keep them reasonably safe. In a building full of sick people, this includes keeping the rooms as clean and antiseptic as possible. When a hospital’s cleaning staff is incompetent, understaffed or not provided with the necessary cleaning supplies, patients have an increased chance of exposure to MRSA. This is also an issue when wounds don’t get regularly cleaned and redressed or MRSA patients don’t get isolated from the other patients.
Medical malpractice regarding MRSA puts lives at risk. Surviving a MRSA infection can be painful and debilitating. And the medical bills can be astronomical. A medical malpractice claim can put the responsibility for this and other damages where it belongs — on the hospital that allowed your MRSA infection to happen.