Bill Clinton and Healthcare Malpractice

Just today the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Nurses Association brought out "A set of principles to guide healthcare transformation in Canada".  What does this have to do with Bill Clinton and malpractice?  I'll get to that in a moment.

The CMA and CNA embrace three principles which must be implemented to make our healthcare system sustainable.  The first is "enhance the healthcare experience", and here they say that care must be patient centered.  They also say that healthcare services must continually strive for "quality".

As counsel to the Breast Cancer Testing Class Action, I sat through a lot of testimony at the Cameron Inquiry that focused on patient centered care and on continuous quality improvement.  I have sources in Eastern Health, and lamentably, they tell me that very little has changed in this regard. 

Now to Bill Clinton.  I attended a conference of the American Association for Justice in New York last week, and it was a real pleasure to hear Bill Clinton speak.  I have posted a (somewhat grainy) photograph on Facebook.  Former President Clinton is a very practised and thoughtful speaker.  One of the things he mentioned was that studies in the United States had found a low rate of hand washing amongst nurses and doctors, and when systems were set up to enforce hand washing to the requisite standard at a number of U.S. hospitals, the in-hospital infection rate all but disappeared.  This is huge!  Needless in-hospital infections cause a huge toll of death and prolonged hospital stays, at great expense to the taxpayer.  Just this morning, there was an item in the news that the Capital Health hospital in Nova Scotia had a low 44% rate of hand washing, and after months of effort, this had improved only to 70%.  Some officials even suggest that it is up to patients to ensure that their caregivers washed their own hands!  I am not aware of any study done at Eastern Health or any other Newfoundland hospital to monitor compliance of hand washing protocols, and can only imagine that our performance here in Newfoundland is as bad as, or worse, than in Nova Scotia and in Ontario, where it has been less than 40%!

I'll give you the following take-home point:  if you or a loved one have suffered serious injury (or even death) due to acquiring an in-hospital infection, talk to an experienced medical and hospital malpractice lawyer.  With recent evidence that these infections are unnecessary and avoidable, you may have a case.

The other point I leave you with is not so much legal as it is political.  Laudable as the CMA and CNA principles may be, the healthcare industry is the biggest industry in Canada, and is in the grip of many powerful vested interests who have a stake in keeping meaningful change from occurring within the system.  I don't think that the change we need is going to happen without governments being elected with a mandate to tackle fundamental change in the system.  Let's hope that the existing healthcare system doesn't have to hit a brick wall before the politicians - and the electorate - are ready to act.