WARRINGTON Hospital has celebrated a year without any cases of MRSA in patients.

The hospital marked a year without any reports of MRSA last month having last seen a patient infected with the bacteria on September 17 2015.

MRSA is resistant to many antibiotics and hospital patients are often most at risk of infection.

Lesley McKay, the hospital’s associate director for infection prevention and control, said: “What we’ve done to try and reduce MRSA is to improve how we manage patients.

“It’s just been a lot of hard work and dedication from all the staff that have followed all the policies and paid diligent attention to patient care that has helped us to get to this position so it’s a big well done to them.

“Infection control is embedded across the whole trust.”

Comparatively, Warrington Hospital had two MRSA infection last year while a decade ago a total of 24 cases were reported in 12 months.

Lesley added: “The biggest risk of MRSA is if it can get inside your body as it can sit on your skin harmlessly – about eight per cent of the population will have MRSA sitting on their skin.

“When patients come into the hospital we’re doing things like putting tubes into their veins or bladders and we’re cutting them during surgery, which gives the bacteria access inside the body and can cause infections.

“The invasive devices are a big risk so we put a lot of systems in place to help how we move drips and how we manage tubes that go into bladders to make sure they come out as quickly as possible.

“We’ve always had safe procedures in place for all of those risks, but for surgery we’ll do things like making sure the operating theatres are working effectively and using anti-septic on the skin before we make incisions to do the surgery.

“We screen all patients coming in as emergencies as well so if we detect that they’ve got MRSA when they’re admitted we isolate them and give them anti-septic hand wash and nasal cream.”