They're Sorry; I'll Bet They Are
The Montfort Hospital did not enjoy a good reputation until latterly, and now, poof! it's on the verge of evaporating. Mind, a lot of hospitals teeter on the verge of evaporating patient expectations and trust, in Canada. Health professionals surely should know better. Some people have always been aware, had it in back of their minds that hospitals are not very healthy places.
Yes, we go there for treatment, we most certainly do. Where else to go in medical need? But hospital stays have always represented a sure-fire source of staph infections. Not to wonder, after all, since there are so many infectious illness and where better to be acquired than in a hospital setting where all those germs and nasty little bacteria circulate?
So how is it, then, one might wonder, that medical professionals have such absent memories?
The discovery by Dr. Semmelweiss in the 1840s of absent hygiene during childbirth deliveries causing maternal deaths through puerperal fever, led to obstetricians and general practitioners finally realizing the efficacy of washing their hands between deliveries, and maternal deaths were eradicated.
As simple an expedient as washing hands. During the SARS epidemic in Toronto, anyone who visited a hospital, including health professionals in those hospitals were instructed to wash their hands as a method of stopping infection, to refrain from carrying it from one place to another, one patient to another, including infecting themselves.
It worked, it always works. Mortality rates plummeted after surgery once surgeons initiated a routine of hand-washing, and embraced the use of antiseptic techniques encouraged by another hygiene pioneer, Dr. Joseph Lister. Bacteriology and microbiology research introduced to medical science by Dr. Louis Pasteur became a mainstay in the understanding of best surgical practises in obstetrics, medicine and surgery.
And the storied Florence Nightingale initiated her own brand of health-reform techniques for improved patient outcomes during the Crimean War, when she convinced the medical world of the necessity of improved sanitation and painstaking hygiene methods, along with responsible nursing care, with trained professional nurses tasked with tending to the sick in hospital settings.
How history repeats itself. In Ontario, the province's auditor general has pointed out the lax hygienic conditions now practised in too many hospitals has led to serious infections, like C. difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA. Largely preventable through good, meticulous house-keeping with trained cleaning staff, and medical professional hand-washing techniques.
It boggles the mind. As simple a remedy as hand-washing eluding the best-practise techniques of informed, highly educated medical practitioners, from nursing staff to surgeons whose high calibre performance capabilities are truncated by laziness in simple hygiene performance. A mere 40% to 75% of hygiene practise is performed by hospital professionals.
In the last five years alone, a hypervirulent strain of the C. difficule bacterium has killed an estimated two thousand patients in Quebec alone. Busy hospitals don't initiate processes to audit staff disinfecting techniques and rates of acceptance of hospital best-practise policies in hygiene. Which is exactly the reason that the Canadian Institute for Health Information indicates that one in ten adults contract infections while in hospital.
Back to the Montfort Hospital and its sorry record revisited. A 76-year-old man, awaiting emergency room treatment was forced to wait in severe pain for over nine hours before he would be seen by a doctor. The triage nurse on duty at the time, in response to his pain and requests for attention told the man, Yatendra Varshni, to "shut up and stop making noise". This is the calibre of a health professional looking after the ill.
A hospital nurse whose job it is to extend compassion and assistance to the ill, telling an esteemed professor emeritus of physics that he should "shut up". As it happened, a very ill man, much younger than Mr. Varshni, also in great pain, but with a severe bladder infection, was quiet, patiently awaiting the opportunity for treatment at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre last week.
The hospital medical staff remained deliberately ignorant of his need. They were familiar with this man, evidently a street person in poor health. He sat there, saying nothing, unlike Mr. Varshni, eliciting no professional interest whatever in his presence there, awaiting attention and treatment. He waited 34 hours, sitting in the same chair in the emergency department.
Until, finally, another patient entering the emergency department realized that the man sitting so quietly in his chair was dead. Winnipeg health officials, facing the disgust and censure of the public, are aghast that something like that could happen on their watch. At the Montfort hospital, administration has launched an investigation, apologizing for the lengthy and painful emergency room wait.
Isn't it incredibly sad that this kind of miserable professional neglect can happen in a country like Canada?
Yes, we go there for treatment, we most certainly do. Where else to go in medical need? But hospital stays have always represented a sure-fire source of staph infections. Not to wonder, after all, since there are so many infectious illness and where better to be acquired than in a hospital setting where all those germs and nasty little bacteria circulate?
So how is it, then, one might wonder, that medical professionals have such absent memories?
The discovery by Dr. Semmelweiss in the 1840s of absent hygiene during childbirth deliveries causing maternal deaths through puerperal fever, led to obstetricians and general practitioners finally realizing the efficacy of washing their hands between deliveries, and maternal deaths were eradicated.
As simple an expedient as washing hands. During the SARS epidemic in Toronto, anyone who visited a hospital, including health professionals in those hospitals were instructed to wash their hands as a method of stopping infection, to refrain from carrying it from one place to another, one patient to another, including infecting themselves.
It worked, it always works. Mortality rates plummeted after surgery once surgeons initiated a routine of hand-washing, and embraced the use of antiseptic techniques encouraged by another hygiene pioneer, Dr. Joseph Lister. Bacteriology and microbiology research introduced to medical science by Dr. Louis Pasteur became a mainstay in the understanding of best surgical practises in obstetrics, medicine and surgery.
And the storied Florence Nightingale initiated her own brand of health-reform techniques for improved patient outcomes during the Crimean War, when she convinced the medical world of the necessity of improved sanitation and painstaking hygiene methods, along with responsible nursing care, with trained professional nurses tasked with tending to the sick in hospital settings.
How history repeats itself. In Ontario, the province's auditor general has pointed out the lax hygienic conditions now practised in too many hospitals has led to serious infections, like C. difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA. Largely preventable through good, meticulous house-keeping with trained cleaning staff, and medical professional hand-washing techniques.
It boggles the mind. As simple a remedy as hand-washing eluding the best-practise techniques of informed, highly educated medical practitioners, from nursing staff to surgeons whose high calibre performance capabilities are truncated by laziness in simple hygiene performance. A mere 40% to 75% of hygiene practise is performed by hospital professionals.
In the last five years alone, a hypervirulent strain of the C. difficule bacterium has killed an estimated two thousand patients in Quebec alone. Busy hospitals don't initiate processes to audit staff disinfecting techniques and rates of acceptance of hospital best-practise policies in hygiene. Which is exactly the reason that the Canadian Institute for Health Information indicates that one in ten adults contract infections while in hospital.
Back to the Montfort Hospital and its sorry record revisited. A 76-year-old man, awaiting emergency room treatment was forced to wait in severe pain for over nine hours before he would be seen by a doctor. The triage nurse on duty at the time, in response to his pain and requests for attention told the man, Yatendra Varshni, to "shut up and stop making noise". This is the calibre of a health professional looking after the ill.
A hospital nurse whose job it is to extend compassion and assistance to the ill, telling an esteemed professor emeritus of physics that he should "shut up". As it happened, a very ill man, much younger than Mr. Varshni, also in great pain, but with a severe bladder infection, was quiet, patiently awaiting the opportunity for treatment at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre last week.
The hospital medical staff remained deliberately ignorant of his need. They were familiar with this man, evidently a street person in poor health. He sat there, saying nothing, unlike Mr. Varshni, eliciting no professional interest whatever in his presence there, awaiting attention and treatment. He waited 34 hours, sitting in the same chair in the emergency department.
Until, finally, another patient entering the emergency department realized that the man sitting so quietly in his chair was dead. Winnipeg health officials, facing the disgust and censure of the public, are aghast that something like that could happen on their watch. At the Montfort hospital, administration has launched an investigation, apologizing for the lengthy and painful emergency room wait.
Isn't it incredibly sad that this kind of miserable professional neglect can happen in a country like Canada?
Labels: Health, Particularities, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ 6:12 PM
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