Surveillance cultures at admission and discharge identified up to 91% of patients colonized with MDRO; daily cultures identified up to 70% of MDRO acquisition events.
How is the spread of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) within the healthcare environment best prevented? Common strategies to track prevalence and acquisition of these organisms entail either assessing clinical culture results daily or performing surveillance cultures at admission and discharge — but the accuracy of both approaches is poorly defined. Sansom et al. queried data from a prospective multicenter microbiome study in which patients admitted to a medical intensive care unit in Chicago had daily collection of fecal samples. The investigators assessed the accuracy of both preventive strategies for detecting MDROs (vancomycin-resistant enterococci, third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacterales, and carbapenem-resistant…