Dirty Hospitals put Canadians at Risk
The Canadian Press
March 10, 2012
The health of hospitalized Canadians and their visitors is being seriously put at risk by hospitals that have cut corners in cleaning budgets to save money, a Market place investigation has revealed.
The program took hidden cameras inside 11 hospitals in Ontario and British Columbia. What they found in many of them were surprisingly inadequate cleaning regimens – in short, dirty hospitals that could make you sick.
In many hospitals, Market place staffers applied a harmless gel to places that many people would touch – hand rails, door handles, light switches, elevator buttons.
The gel glows when seen under an ultra-violet light. But most of the time – and this was true in every hospital where Marketplace carried out gel tests – the gel was still there more than 24 hours later, meaning the surfaces had not been cleaned at all.
The program talked to cleaners, supervisors, nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators to get a handle on what has become a major problem at Canadian health-care facilities – a shocking number of hospital-acquired infections.
About 250,000 Canadians come down with life-threatening infections while in hospitals every year. That’s the highest rate in the developed world. As many as 12,000 people a year die.
Gary Bell was admitted to Niagara General Hospital for treatment of pancreatitis in 2011. While there, he contracted C. difficile and never recovered. He was admitted to Niagara General Hospital for treatment of pancreatitis. The 63-year-old retired school teacher contracted C. difficile – a life-threatening superbug that is all too common in Canadian hospitals. It ended up playing a role in his death a few months later.
Denise Ball remembers the cleaning regimen in her husband's room was less than adequate, saying the cleaners would spend only 10 minutes on a room everyone knew was infected with C. difficile. She says a proper cleaning would have taken much longer.
Time and again, hospital insiders told Marketplace that cleaners were being asked to do more with less.
"We used to have one person to one wing of a hospital to clean," one cleaner said. "Now, we have three floors to clean."
A cleaning supervisor at one hospital told Marketplace host Erica Johnson that it's "common practice" for cleaners not to change the cleaning solution in the bucket when mopping up. "They just don't have the time," the supervisor said.
Sometimes there aren't enough cleaning supplies. A nurse, whose identity Marketplace protected, said she's seen a cleaner mopping common areas after having mopped the rooms of infected patients because she didn't have enough mops to change. "She's just cross-contaminated the whole area, so there's no area that was actually clean."
Sometimes, only one cleaner would be on staff in an entire hospital during night shifts. "That kind of day-night difference is very common, and it makes no sense," says Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease expert at the University Health Network in Vancouver.
It's not like we haven't seen the devastating results of hospital-acquired illness. Newscasts and newspapers have been filled with stories of hospitals under quarantine because of C. difficile outbreaks. In the last decade, outbreaks have hit hospitals in most provinces. A huge outbreak in 2003 and 2004 led to as many as 2,000 deaths in Quebec.
There's something else that some observers think is helping to drive the pressure to skimp on cleaning. In Ontario and British Columbia, for example, hospitals are given bonuses for turning over beds quickly – hundreds of extra dollars each time a hospital gets a patient out of a room before a certain time.
"They just don't get it," says Denise Ball. "And maybe until one of their loved ones that went in healthy and … a few months later ... they're going to their grave. Maybe that's what will wake them up."
