What is PD/MRSA?

In 2005 Plexus Institute received a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to launch a pioneering initiative employing positive deviance(PD) to prevent the transmission of MRSA infections in healthcare facilities. This initiative involves a partnership between Plexus, the federal CDC, the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University, the Maryland Patient Safety Center and a nationwide network of 40 hospitals committed to preventing hospital-acquired infections.

What is unique (and congruent with complexity thinking) about Positive Deviance is that it engages all members of a hospital community in the process of discovering successful practices that are already in use by some of its members or in the process of developing new practices. This distributed ownership stands in stark contrast with the conventional top-down protocol driven approach to infection control.

Plexus has recently begun to play an important role in a collaborative initiative at the VA hospital in Pittsburgh (which was the first to start implementation) that has produced very encouraging results. In 2006, for the first time in the history of the hospital MRSA transmission rates for surgical patients have dropped to almost zero.

Impressed by the results at the Pittsburgh VA hospital, the Department of Veterans Affairs engaged Plexus Institute in August 2006 to support five of its hospitals for the first phase of a national effort to tackle MRSA in all 160 VA hospitals in the country. The VA national initiative, called “Getting to Zero” aims to eradicate MRSA throughout its system.

In addition, with sponsorship from the Latin American division of Merck, Plexus has begun to work with a network of hospitals in Colombia to help them apply Positive Deviance in their efforts to combat MRSA.

Interested? Click here to get more background information. And join us on this awesome journey- check our blog often and please feel free to leave comments, ideas, suggestions.