MRSA surveillance programmes worldwide: moving towards a harmonised international approach

A B S T R A C T Multinational surveillance programmes for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are dependent on national structures for data collection. This study aimed to capture the diversity of national MRSA surveillance programmes and to propose a framework for harmonisation of MRSA surveillance. The International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC) MRSA Working Group conducted a structured survey on MRSA surveillance programmes and organised a webinar to discuss the programmes' strengths and challenges as well as guidelines for harmonisation. Completed surveys represented 24 MRSA surveil-lance programmes in 16 countries. Several countries reported separate epidemiological and microbiolog-ical surveillance. Informing clinicians and national policy-makers were the most common purposes of surveillance. Surveillance of bloodstream infections (BSIs) was present in all programmes. Other invasive infections were often included. Three countries reported active surveillance of MRSA carriage. Method-ology and reporting of antimicrobial susceptibility, virulence factors, molecular genotyping and epidemi-ological metadata varied greatly. Current MRSA surveillance programmes rely upon heterogeneous data collection systems, which hampers international epidemiological monitoring and research. To harmonise MRSA surveillance, we suggest improving the integration of microbiological and epidemiological data, im-plementation of central biobanks for MRSA isolate collection, and inclusion of a representative sample of skin and soft-tissue infection cases in addition to all BSI cases.Crown Copyright (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )