MRSA carriage among healthcare workers in non-outbreak settings in Europe and the United States: a systematic review

Table 1 Checklist for the quality assessment of MRSA prevalence surveys in healthcare workers

Number	Criteria*	Content
1	Specification of the target population	Are study subjects and the setting described?
2	Adequate sample size**	Is the sample size adequate?
3	Adequate response rate	Is the response rate adequate - at least 60%?
4	Information on non-responders	Are the non-responders described?
5	Valid and repeatable disease definition	Are standard measures (microbiological and molecular typing methods) used for detection of MRSA?
6	Bias	Are efforts described to address potential sources of bias and/or have potential sources of bias been discussed?
7	Interpretation of the results	Were confidence intervals or standard errors presented for the estimates of prevalence?

*Criteria adopted from [27, 28].
**Calculation of adequate sample size was based on the following assumptions: prevalence rate of MRSA in healthcare workers = 5%, error rate ±2.5 at the 95% confidence level, resulting in a sample size of 284; we considered a final sample size (after subtracting the non-responders) to be of 250.

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