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Media Release: 9:00 p.m. August 16, 2011
The province of Ontario must require hospitals to report to the public all cases of hospital- acquired infections when they arise, the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions asserts. “In the outbreaks in the Niagara Health System and at the Kingston General Hospital there were multiple cases of Clostridium difficile confirmed before the public was notified. The current standard for declaring an outbreak in Ontario is too high and the delays in declaring an outbreak mean that people cannot weigh the risk to themselves or a family member”, says OCHU president Michael Hurley.
“Ontario needs an aggressive approach to hospital acquired infections, which will kill between 3,200 and 5,000 patients in Ontario hospitals in 2011. Jurisdictions like the Netherlands and Scotland are much more proactive. In those countries hospital bed occupancy rates have been pushed down; reporting requirements are much more stringent; more hospital cleaners have been hired and the contracting-out of hospital cleaning has been banned” Hurley says.
“In Ontario our major focus has been on hand-washing. But there are studies that show that the alcohol gels in Ontario hospitals may not be effective at killing C. difficile in particular. Hand washing with soap and water is also necessary. In Niagara some clinical care areas did not have sinks”, says Hurley.
Between 1991 and 2003, a period when 15,000 hospital beds were cut in Ontario, the rate of patients contracting Clostridium difficile increased almost five-fold. Ontario has the fewest number of acute hospital beds to population of any developed economy in the world. Ontario’s hospital occupancy rate of 97.9% results in overcrowding, which was cited in the review of the outbreak in Burlington, at Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital, as a key culprit in the deaths of over 90 patients in that facility.
“Ontario’s bed occupancy rate needs to come down for us to deal effectively with hospital-acquired infections ” says Hurley.
The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions has waged a seven year campaign on hospital acquired infections and is sponsoring an international conference on Medical Errors and Hospital Acquired Infections in June, 2012.
