CANADA: 'No-brainer' hand-washing lesson costs taxpayer $16M

17.jan.08
Calgary Herald
Don Braid

BarfBlog

According to columnist Braid, your mother always told you to wash your hands, but she never tried to charge you $16 million for the advice.
The province will spend that astonishing amount to promote "hand hygiene." Hand washing, to you.
Most amazing of all, the recipients of this advice will be the province's many thousands of health-care employees. Didn't they listen to their mothers?
Asked what all that money would buy, Health Minister Dave Hancock shrugged, sort of, and said, "sinks."
The story says that a report last summer showed that standards for infection control vary sharply among hospitals and regions, from good to bad.
Hancock is trying to create a central reporting and control system to make sure stringent, uniform standards are applied.
The goal is laudable, but for most Albertans, well or ill, it will seem patently absurd that a modern health system has to be taught about hand-washing.
Staff people are rushed and sometimes they forget, the minister says. Racing between patients or rooms without cleaning up can cause or aggravate illness.
With severe labour shortages, though, many nurses and doctors are lucky even to get to the next room, never mind staging a Hollywood scrub scene every time they move.
The story says that the initiative looks less absurd when we remember where it came from -- the richly funded East Central health region, in Premier Ed Stelmach's own riding.
A scandal last spring revealed a truly shocking picture; infection was spreading among patients because some staff people were not washing their hands.
Surgical instruments weren't being cleaned properly, either. Disgustingly, tissue from one patient was being planted in the next. Only through blind luck did the region avoid creating an epidemic.
All this had been known in the region, but wasn't reported to the government. That's what really enraged both Hancock and Stelmach.
Quintessential politician-bureaucrats, they launched a pair of studies, and Wednesday's announcement was the result.
There's more to it than handwashing: a new reporting structure, for one thing. But the results might be as much political as medical.
The province will have much more control over the system, and regional medical officers of health will become very powerful, indeed.