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by Jeremy Petch, Christopher Doig & Irfan Dhalla AUGUST 1, 2013 In the modern economy, many industries, such as aviation, retail and manufacturing, no longer slow down over weekends. Yet hospitals have mostly resisted this trend, even though demand for many forms of health care is no less on weekends than on weekdays. While most hospitals are open every day of the week, many operate with substantially reduced staffing levels on holidays and weekends. A typical internal medicine ward at a teaching hospital in Ontario, for example, might function with only one-third of the doctors on the weekend that it would have on a weekday. And the most senior of these doctors will have left the hospital by early afternoon. Allied health professionals (such as physiotherapists and dieticians) are often also absent on weekends, with only nurses staffed in numbers that are comparable to weekday staffing levels. It is understandable that health care professionals do not wish work over the weekend, but evidence points to a concerning "weekend effect" at hospitals: a small but meaningful increased risk of death associated with a hospital stay on a weekend versus a weekday. Is it time for hospitals to start staffing at the same level all week?

The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton) Fri Aug 9 2013 Page: A1 Section: A Byline: ADAM BOWIE bowie.adam@dailygleaner.com The Horizon Health Network will move to disposable surgical linens and customized surgical kits by the winter of 2014. For more than a year, union officials who represent health-care providers and allied health professionals from across the province have expressed concerns about a proposed plan to switch from reusable operating room linens to disposable one-off products in provincial hospitals, citing environmental impacts and potential job losses as negative factors. In that time, The Daily Gleaner submitted multiple requests for information to the Horizon Health Network about the proposal. Several times the newspaper was told that it was under consideration and that nobody from the province's largest regional health authority would be commenting on the nature of the planned changes. Now Horizon officials say the changes will happen late next year and they've outlined the reasons behind the push to transition to a new product. Margaret Melanson, the Horizon Health Network's executive director of the Saint John zone and chairwoman of the regional health authority's surgical committee, said hospitals in the Fredericton, Saint John and Miramichi zones will soon be making the change, noting facilities in the Moncton zone are already using disposable surgical linens. "These products would be used predominantly within the surgical areas, the operating rooms; however, also within labour and delivery suites, within clinics and ambulatory areas, where small, minor surgical procedures are performed, and other areas, such as interventional radiology," she said. for more email hfarrow@cupe.ca

Our 2012 annual report is now available in English The report shows: "While it has more material and human resources, Quebec is less effective than Canada as a whole in providing accessible medical imaging services. The exclusion from public coverage of CAT scan, MRI and ultrasound tests performed outside a hospital leads to joint public-private practice that has the effect of draining resources from the public to the private sector. This damaging distortion leads to problems of access to medical imaging for most patients…"  The report documents the inequitable, inefficient, costly and potentially unsafe utilization of medical imaging technology in Quebec's unique and highly privatized system.  One aspect, the relatively effective use of technology in hospitals compared to private clinics (which would be better yet if the system were entirely public), is clearly not limited to Quebec: "According to a 2008 study by Bercovici and Bell of public hospitals and private clinics offering MRIs in several provinces, including Quebec, the rate of use of machines is about 50% higher in hospitals than in private clinics: an average of 14.7 hours of operation per day during the week and 11.8 hours per day on weekends for hospital machines, compared to 9.7 hours per day during the week and 8.2 hours per day on weekends for machines in clinics." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2645224/ The recommendations are also valuable information.