THE government is bracing itself for a multi-million-euro compensation bill from MRSA victims and their families following last week’s damning report into the state of hygiene in Irish hospitals.

The publication is likely to bolster the legal actions being taken by MRSA sufferers. It is currently being analysed by British-based infection control experts, who are advising a number of Irish legal firms.

The independent audit, commissioned last year by the health minister, Mary Harney, after several hospitals refused to reveal their MRSA rates, revealed that 91% of Irish hospitals do not have acceptable standards of hygiene.

Galway lawyers are preparing a €3m claim from a woman in her early twenties who contracted MRSA. But this is just the biggest of more than 200 cases believed to be in preparation by medical litigation and personal injury lawyers against the Department of Health, the Health Services Executive, and a number of hospitals named in the audit. The MRSA bug is estimated to have killed more than 240 patients last year.

“There was always a risk that litigation would arise from a range of hospital-acquired infections,” said Pat McLoughlin, director of the HSE’s national hospitals office.

“I have been made aware by individual hospital managers of a number of cases, but we are not yet fully aware of the extent of the claims. Every case is different and will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

Earlier this year, a 68-year-old grandmother who claims to have contracted MRSA at St Luke’s hospital, Kilkenny, became the first Irish patient to sue the government for compensation. Lawyers acting for Anne Brennan, of Upper Shankhill, Paulstown, Kilkenny, have sought an early date for the hearing of her case as she is critically ill.

The case, the first of its kind, follows a landmark legal ruling in Britain in which an 87-year-old was awarded “substantial damages” after the hospital in which she contracted the superbug admitted it had ignored infection-control policies.

Brennan will argue that had her surgeon and St Luke’s followed the state’s guidelines on infection control, she would not have caught the superbug.

“MRSA is rampant in Irish hospitals. The state has been exposed enormously by its own report, and rightly so,” said John McGuiness, a Kilkenny TD and co-founder of MRSA and Families, a support group.

“Solicitors throughout the country are working together and combining their expertise. Last week’s report will only serve to strengthen their case against the state, which created the problem in the first place.”

Earlier this year the Irish Society of Clinical Microbiologists, met with Harney and the State Claims Agency, a statutory body set up to mange personal injury claims against the Irish government, to discuss the threat of litigation.

The SCA, which has indicated that it will vigorously contest claims, was warned that hospitals routinely fail to adhere to infection control guidelines.

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