Hospital can’t test man for bug

Date Published: 30-Nov-2007

A man who says he contracted MRSA while in University Hospital Galway after having surgery to remove one of his kidneys, has been told that the test to determine whether or not he still has it could not be processed in the hospital’s lab because of staff shortages due to the recruitment freeze.

Speaking to the Galway City Tribune yesterday, the 56- year-old man — who asked not to be named — said he had gone into the city hospital in mid-October to have his right kidney removed, after a lump, which he later learned was cancerous, was discovered in the organ.

He was in the hospital for just over two weeks; but three days before he was released, he was taken from the ward he had been staying in and brought to an isolated unit.

He was told that a swab taken from a wound on his back — where a tube had been placed to take fluid out of his lung, and had been removed three days after the operation — found MRSA on the wound.

It had not, however, got into his bloodstream.

MRSA, or Methicillin……