A Foreword by Doug Draper
This Wednesday, July 13, C BC Radio Noon program did an hour on the C. difficile outbreak that has so far taken the lives of 22 people and counting at Niagara Health System-managed hospitals in this region and has claimed the lives of others across the province.
One of the accounts phoned in to the program, by someone named “Michele” in St. Catharines, Ontario who recently had a sister in her 50s in the hospital who contracted the superbug but fortunately did not die, was particularly disturbing. Michele’s account spoke to so many other claims, including one in a recent letter posted by a former NHS doctor on this site, of the filthy conditions at the St. Catharines General Hospital.
We at Niagara At Large can only wonder why, if what Michele testified about feces on her sisters chair, on the floor and so on. To the extent this is true, and again we’ve had notes from others about the uncleanliness of this hospital site, why aren’t nurses and doctors breaking away from the NHS and speaking out? You’d think that at least a few of them would say; ‘To hell with any flak I have to take from the NHS board. Something has to be done about this, and now!’
Here is the transcribed view from Michele on CBC’s Radio Noon. Michele – “Thank you for taking my call. It is a little bit of hell down here, I can tell you that. Speaking of my sister was 54, just finished chemo and had to go on antibiotics because she had a bladder infection and of course it turned into C. diff and it made chemo look like a cake walk.”
“She spent a month at St. Catharines General where the conditions where horrendous. Feces on her chair, on her camode for two weeks at a time weeks at a time. Finally I couldn’t stand to look at it any more and cleaned it. This sort of nonsense. I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. The doctor (a medical expert appearing as a guest on the program) mentioned a few minutes ago that the system is not helpless in this. Well I can tell you that the patients and their families. … that’s how we feel. We feel like we have been imprisoned and that nobody is listening. And really the cleanliness starts with anybody that works in that hospital, needs to lay in a bed for 10 minutes and look around, and they will be amazed at what they see.”
Long story short, my sister was in for a month , never on a liquid diet or anything else. The food they bring is roast beef and mashed potatoes for someone who has C. diff. Come on! Like there was never any soft (food and) half the time she couldn’t eat.”
The CBC Radio Noon host – “Michele just a question. When you were visiting your sister and you saw evidence obviously of uncleanliness, what was the response?”
“I was flabbergasted and I contacted somebody I know who actually works at the hospital and I said who is responsible for cleaning this and they said ultimately the nurses and not the cleaning staff for cleaning this. And the thing is, you are always careful because if you upset anybody or make anyone angry the patient may very well pay for it and there was no way I was going to put my sister through more hell.”
“There were hours and hours and hours where she was ignored, and to this day she will start to cry as if she was in a concentration camp and she is not the only one.”
“And the thing that really bothered me too, they kept talking how they were transparent and so on, and how all the patients were kept on the same floor. That is not true. There were at least four people on that floor my sister was on. Everybody else was upstairs. So the doctors are going back and forth from the second to third floor and I honestly believe that C. diff is not just transmitted through (hands), I think it is people with their shoes. I mean there was feces on the floor. How can that not be transmitted from one floor to the next.”
If you have comments on this post or information of your own that you would like to share on the conditions in the hospitals managed by the Niagara Health System, share them below.
Niagara At Large 
Prediction: With the new St. Catharine’s Hospital coming on stream the NHS reaction to the C-difficile outbreaks will be further service cuts to existing older hospitals in the region. To them it is always a numbers game and has nothing to do with serving local requirements. As a Port Colborne resident, this greatly concerns me.
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That would not surprise me in the least, John. Niagara has always been the poor cousin when it comes to health care and we never had an equal per capita funding for hospitals for people in Niagara, when compared to elsewhere, considering our ageing population, high rates of pollution and so forth. In Toronto, they are talking about taking procedures out of hospitals and put them into specialized clinics (e.g. eye surgery, hernias) and fund them under OHIP. We have no such clinics here and the hospitals are all being cut back. Where does this leave us?
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My wife has heard a similar story from a friend whose 85-yr-old mother passed on to the next world from SCGH this past spring.
As well, my mother-in-law was in Welland (WCGH) in Dec.2010 with pneumonia and cookie crumbs, etc. were left on the floor for a day or so, even after reporting it to the nurses (she was too sick to clean it herself).
Frightening.
Do you think all of our NHS problems are happening because Niagara hospitals are under-Funded by OHIP, and therefore under-Staffed? The Welland Tribune has reported more than once that Niagara receives less money per capita than the GTA and other higher-population areas. While the larger areas may include more funds for specialty hospitals, all general hospitals should get about the same per capita funding. Why has this happened and why has it not been corrected?
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Doug:
Here’s the URL to listen to the CBC’s “Ontario Today” you mentioned above:
http://www.cbc.ca/ontariotoday/2011/07/12/wednesday-c-difficile/
Another person reported on the death of his mother in January from C.Difficile at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton. At the end of his report, both he and the interviewer were so moved/distraught by his story that there was at least 10 seconds of silence -with just the background hissing of the ether to let me know that my radio still worked- before the interviewer -with quavering voice- asked another question. ‘Dead Air’ is a no-no in radio – I’ve never heard that happen in Many years of listening to CBC.
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John, the continuing implementation of the HIP guarantees further cuts — and, yes, it’s all about money. The NHS has done an admirable job of reducing its deficit, as demanded by the LHIN, acting for the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (see the NHS April 2011 HIP Report). Those savings have gutted our hospitals, contributed to the C.diff. outbreak (and probably to the proportionally high number of deaths here in Niagara), and put our population at serious risk. Niagara must DEMAND the resignation of Health Minister Deb Matthews. Such callousness as she has shown towards the residents of Niagara cannot be ignored.
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The NHS in the midst of this crisis, sadly views this merely as a minor glitch, a bump in the road if you will. They see a silver lining in the c-difficile crisis as a justification for the HIP whereas most of us see this as an epic tragedy caused in large part by the HIP.
We can demand Matthews head all we want but on the eve of an election, McGuinty will absolutely not throw her under the bus. That would be tantamount to admitting his government has utterly failed on healthcare.
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There was an article in the Toronto Star that held McGuinty did very well on the health care file that he is actually hedging his re-election bids on this. I almost laughed myself off my chair. That certainly wouldn’t pass muster here in Niagara. And I live in St. Catharines … I am very angry about what this is doing to the folks in Niagara South.
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