Staphylococcus aureus is known to cause both hospital and community acquired infections. Hospital acquired strains are usually multidrug resistant. Treatment of infection due to these organisms and their eradication is very difficult. Monitoring of these strains is essential in order to control their spread in the hospital environment and transmission to the community. The present study was conducted in the Department of Microbiology, JNMC, India for a period of two years. All subjects in the study were divided into two groups: GROUP 1- consisted of patients admitted in various wards. GROUP 2: Consisted of the health care workers. Detection of methicillin susceptibility was done by both phenotypic and by genotypic methods. Antibiotic susceptibility testing of all the MRSA strains was done. A total of 412 S. aureus were isolated from the clinical samples. 138(33.49%) of the clinical isolates were found to be methicillin resistant by oxacillin disc diffusion method. However 134(32.44%) isolates were confirmed to be methicillin resistant genotypically. Prevalence of MRSA was highest amongst the orthopaedics 56(46.67%) and the surgery 34(35.42%) wards. 109(81.34%) were MDR-MRSA (resistant to >3 antibiotics). 34% of the health care workers were MRSA carriers. Phage typing showed that among the clinical MRSA strains group I was the predominant phage type. The resistance of MRSA towards commonly used antibiotics is alarmingly high. Health care workers are an important source of transmission of infection between the hospitalised patients and they should acclimatize to proper hand washing and other simple infection control practices to inhibit such transmission.