Objective: Culture-based vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) identification methods generally require 24-72 hours. Rapid isolation of VRE colonised patients is crucial to prevent colonisation of other patients and propable infections. The aim of this study is to compare the results of BD GeneOhm VanR test which identifies VRE in a short time with the gold standard which is VRE culture.

Material and Methods: A total of 704 samples in the study were cultivated on VRE agar. At the same time, all perirectal swap samples were evaluated with real-time PCR.

Results: Among the evaluated samples, 121 (17.2%) were positive with VRE agar and 162 (23.0%) were positive with real-time PCR. The number of samples which were positive with both diagnostic methods were 118. Of the samples, 44 were found to be positive only with real-time PCR and 3 with culture methods. The number of samples negative with both methods were 539 (76.6%). All VRE positive samples except 3 were Enterococcus faecium carrying VanA phenotype, and the 3 samples mentioned were identified as E. faecalis carrying VanB phenotype with both culture and real-time PCR. According to these results; sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive (PPV) and negative predictive values (NPV) of BD GeneOhm VanR test compared to VRE culture were 98, 92, 73, and 99%, respectively.

Conclusion: Culture-based methods and nucleic acid amplification tests require 24-72 hours for VRE identification. BD GeneOhm VanR test is a simple diagnostic method that is directly carried out on the sample and takes less than 3.5 hours to obtain results. On the other hand, it gives repeatable results in patient samples and in different laboratories, and it has high PPV and NPV. Its other advantage is the identification of the VRE-resistance gene.