Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ontario auditor slams hospitals over C. difficile

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Ontario auditor slams hospitals over C. difficile

    Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...Story/National

    Ontario auditor slams hospitals over C. difficile

    KAREN HOWLETT

    September 30, 2008

    Poor hand hygiene and housekeeping standards in Ontario hospitals provided a breeding ground for the spread of a highly contagious superbug that claimed the lives of 75 patients at one health-care institution alone, the province's auditor says.

    In a report released yesterday into an outbreak of Clostridium difficile, commonly known as C. difficile, Auditor-General Jim McCarter says hospitals do not always properly sterilize surgical instruments or ensure that rooms occupied by patients with the infection are adequately cleaned.

    The auditor also found that many physicians and nurses do not wash their hands often enough.
    C. difficile is a particularly menacing infection that causes diarrhea and travels from person to person through hand contact. Good hand hygiene is the single most effective way to prevent its spread.

    A Ministry of Health hand-hygiene pilot program exposed the problem. Among the 10 hospitals that participated, only 28 per cent of physicians were complying by the end of it, up from just 18 per cent at the beginning. Nurses performed better, with 60 per cent complying by the end of the program, up from 44 per cent at the start.

    Michael Gardam, the director of infection protection and control at Toronto's University Health Network, said nothing in the auditor's report came as a surprise to him.

    "We've known for quite a while that we need good housekeeping standards and guidelines to help hospitals know how much they're supposed to be cleaning and how often," Dr. Gardam said yesterday in an interview. "All these things are issues that have been on the radar for quite a while."

    The auditor's report caps several months of negative publicity for the Ontario government over its handling of the C. difficile outbreak. Government officials were forced to introduce mandatory reporting of the infection after admitting that they had no idea how many of the province's 157 hospitals were grappling with C. difficile.

    Under the new reporting rules that came into effect last Friday, hospitals across Ontario reported 319 cases of the infection during August. But the government came under fire for not also requiring hospitals to report the number of deaths.

    The auditor's office visited three hospitals in Toronto, Ottawa and Windsor to assess their efforts at preventing and controlling hospital-acquired infections. The auditor concluded that they need to make improvements in a number of areas. Two of the hospitals did not track which equipment was used on which patient, making it difficult to notify patients if the equipment was subsequently found to have been improperly sterilized, the report says.

    None of the hospitals had systems to monitor use by staff of protective equipment, such as gloves, gowns and masks. The hospitals had different policies for isolating patients with infectious diseases in private rooms, and one of the hospitals cleaned rooms occupied by patients with C. difficile only once a day, the report says.

    Mr. McCarter said in an interview that hospitals need to change their culture in order to ensure that proper hygiene is followed.

    "The whole area of hand-washing is probably job No. 1," he said.

    The incidence of C. difficile may be slightly higher in Ontario than in Canada as a whole, the report says. Ontario had 5.53 cases for every 1,000 hospital admissions during the first four months of 2007, compared with 4.74 cases for Canada overall, the report says.

    Dr. Gardam said the rate is higher in Ontario because the province is one of the first in Canada where the bacterium arose.

    Progressive Conservative MPP Elizabeth Witmer criticized the government yesterday for not imposing mandatory reporting sooner, a move she said would have helped to reduce the number of cases.

    "The government has basically turned a blind eye to this problem," she told reporters.

  • #2
    Re: Ontario auditor slams hospitals over C. difficile

    From w... fields to the civilian ones.

    "Mr. McCarter said in an interview that hospitals need to change their culture in order to ensure that proper hygiene is followed.
    "The whole area of hand-washing is probably job No. 1," he said."

    Instead of pledging for culture, an good filled law procedure for live damages of hospital patients would maybe stress the branch to instaurate an more "bushido" codex, and to engage more auxiliary personell in much more frequently daily decontamination of all the hospital surfaces.

    Comment

    Working...
    X