Invisible Dangers: Are Canadian hospitals doing enough to fend off
infections?
Patients admitted to Canadian hospitals expect that their stay will
make them healthier, yet a record number of Canadians are taking an
infection home with them. And often those infections are resistant to
many antibiotics, requiring people to take powerful medicine to fight
the infection. Methicillin-resistant staphlycoccus aureus (MRSA),
vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and Clostridium difficle are
the most common hospital-acquired infections. An estimated 8,000
people die from antibiotic-resistant infections each year. Studies
show that patients will spend on average an additional 39 days in
hospital recovering from an antibiotic-resistant infection. Read some
of the personal stories of patients who contracted MRSA here.
According to Dr. Michael Rachlis, nursing staff and cleaners are often
the first to be cut when hospitals have a budget crunch. Yet studies
show hospitals are spending $100 million a year treating patients with
antibiotic resistant infections they contracted in the hospital. Read
more about the economics of these infections here in “The Economic
Impact of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus in Canadian
Hospitals,” from the journal Infection Control and Hospital
Epidemiology.
CBC News’ Investigative Unit has visited
several Canadian hospitals and gathered disturbing information about
their cleanliness and the lack of shared information between
hospitals.
The Public Health Agency
of Canada puts out a Canada Communicable Disease Report once a month.
In the February issue, they looked at the Canadian Nosocomial
Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP) and its latest results. The
CNISP has been in place since January 1995.In 2003, 38 hospitals
participated in the CNISP across nine provinces. According to the
Report, MRSA rates are 10 times higher than they were when the CNISP
process started in 1995. Other countries are also paying attention to
their own MRSA rates. The UK Department of Health has posted its
latest statistical data as of March 7, 2005. The Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention in the U.S. has put up a new page describing
what it is doing about MRSA. Based on its own research, the Canadian
Association for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease (CACMID)
recently said on its website “There are serious gaps in infection
control in Canadian hospitals.”
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