Never Mind A Review. We Need A Full Purging Of NHS’s Administration And Board

A Commentary by Doug Draper

“It is almost hard to believe this is Canada. … This shouldn’t be happening in our hospitals in Niagara.”

Those were the first words spoken by Wayne Gates, a Niagara Falls, Ontario city councillor and president of the Canadian Auto Workers Local 199 following two hours of heart-wrenching accounts from residents whose families have experienced the nightmare of the C. difficile outbreak in hospitals managed by the Niagara Health System.

Gates’ words no doubt channeled the thoughts going through the minds of many of the more than 100 residents who came to the CAW this August 10 to hear accounts that could only make one wonder what has become of a public health system in this province and country that was once a model for the world.

This listener, at least, could also not help coming to the conclusion that a planned “review” by the province of the way the Niagara Health System is managing most of the hospital services of this region may be an unnecessary and costly diversion. What we really need – right now – is a total purging of those in the NHS’s administration and on its board who have been complicit through their negligence, incompetence or their silence while access to quality care in our hospitals has deteriorated to a point where people are going to hospital for one ailment and dying from another.

That was the case for Gerry Flachs, a 78-year-old Niagara Falls resident who went into the NHS hospital in that city this June for a knee replacement after getting a clean bill of health from his doctors, and left the NHS’s St. Catharines General hospital site dead this July after contracting the deadly C. diff bug, his wife Flo told those at the meeting.

Flachs went on to talk about to talk about dried up blood and other uncleanly conditions her husband faced in the hospital as he contracted the deadly superbug and lived out his last days in severe pain with her and other members of the family, including a 12-year-old granddaughter, at his bedside.

“I hope you never have to watch your grandchildren or anyone else in your family see a loved one die in agony,” said Flachs who added that way back before the NHS took over the Greater Niagara General Hospital in her city a decade ago, she and her husband donated money to a hospital she said was run well and providing a high quality of care to patients at the time.

“Now it is the worst of the worst in Ontario,” she said. “When is the NHS going to wake up and realize that they are malfunctioning? Let someone else run (Niagara’s hospitals).”

This commentary could go on and on to highlight other accounts, like the one from Ronald Brown, whose 91-year-old father went into the NHS’s Welland Hospital site for one malady this spring only to die from C. diff this spring after an outbreak of the lethal bug was finally make public there. He said his dad was actually discharged from the hospital with the disease and went back to a retirement home in Pelham where he could have infected others. He too talked about the uncleanliness of the hospital during his father’s ordeal.

“Seniors should not have to suffer the indignity of this disease in their final days when it can be so easily prevented with cleanliness,” Brown said.

Steve McMullen, whose elderly mother Marion remains in NHS’s St. Catharines hospital site with C. diff. and whose account is featured on Niagara At Large’s news site, recalled how long it took for the hospital to even confirm his mother was infected with the bug – something that can be done with a test that costs about 70 bucks – and how much she has suffered in what he described as something far less than good quality conditions.

“The cuts (to nursing and cleaning in NHS hospitals), the secrecy and the decisions by the NHS are what attributed to this C. diff outbreak,” said McMullen. “It was not just misdiagnosis or complacency, and other victims have also paid for this.”

To date, 31 in Niagara have paid with their lives, including 89-year-old Marjorie Howe, the mother of Joyce Western and Wesley Howe, who was admitted to the St. Catharines hospital site in May with pneumonia and ended up dying in early June after finally being diagnosed with C. diff. Again there were the stories here of uncleanliness in the hospital, a failure for days upon days to confirm she had been infected with the superbug, even though she was suffering from the symptoms (one of the nurses told Western, at one point), Marjorie  “could (have) a bug, and on and on. Western said she even found two of her mother’s hearing aids, worth about a thousand dollars a piece, carelessly tossed in the trash by hospital staff.

“Only when the public revolted,” said Western of the public reactions earlier this summer to outbreaks of C. diff at the St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland hospital sites, “did the NHS take action, and the jury is still out on that.” The NHS has been just as inclined, she added, to blame the outbreak on its front-line staff and members of the public visiting the hospital for not properly cleaning their hands. “Because of your lack of respect for humanity,” she charged of the NHS brass, “we have exited (hospitals) with the body of our loved one.”

There is no way you can do justice in a short story to these disturbing accounts, including one by 33-year-old Shelly Peavoy, who entered the Niagara Falls hospital site in 2008 with a sore on her back and was ultimately diagnosed with another deadly superbug, Methicillan-resistant Staphylococcus Aureas or MRSA, for short, that covered half her body with painful boils, and almost killed her. After spending time in a wheelchair, she was finally able to get around with the aid of a walker, and walked to the podium with a cane as she recounted episodes of filth and neglect similar to those told by the families of C. diff victims.

Peavoy said it was only after she went to McMaster University Hospital in Hamilton that she got the care that helped her recover.  She said a doctor at that hospital did more for her in a week “than the NHS did not do for me in all of the months I was there.”

Now there’s a sad comment on the quality of care at our NHS sites, isn’t it!

Soaking all of this in at the back of the CAW meeting hall was Brady Wood, a new interim communications expert the NHS has parachuted in from Hamilton to help it try to clean up its credibility crisis with the public. He was later quoted sayng in a St. Catharines newspaper that the accounts by the family members were “deeply tragic” and “gut wrenching.” The NHS, he added, “absolutely must work hard to do better. Me being here today, I think, expresses a willingness on the part of the organization to listen, to learn, to take responsibility and to do better.”

By doing what though, sir? Let’s give you, a new guy on the block, some credit for showing up at a meeting where, except for the basic humanity of most Niagara residents, you could have been publicly pilloried.

That does not mean to say that many of these same residents, judging by what they have said through years of protesting NHS’s actions and plans for hospital services in the region, will be prepared to give this body another chance until every last one of the administrators and board members, right down to the last flunky communications officers who’ve presided over the mess those services are today are bounced out of there.

As for the doctors and nurses at the NHS, we’ve heard there may be reprisals if they speak out. But when are they gong to show the courage these family members did and speak out anyway, not only for themselves but for the public they are sworn to serve?

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