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Irene Jansen

Cleaners important to health care. HEU. Vancouver Sun. - 2 views

www.vancouversun.com/...story.html

hai cupe scotland bc contracting out

shared by Irene Jansen on 05 May 12 - No Cached
  • Scotland banned the contracting out of hospital housekeeping in 2008 and brought cleaning back in house. The result? According to the latest figures from Health Protection Scotland, cases of C. difficile have dropped dramatically.
Govind Rao

Public debate begins in Scotland on future of NHS | The BMJ - 0 views

www.bmj.com/...bmj.h4266

from heather NHS Scotland

shared by Govind Rao on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • MJ 2015; 351 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4266 (Published 07 August 2015) Cite this as: BMJ 2015;351:h4266
  • Bryan Christie
  • An open debate has begun on the future of health and social care services in Scotland, inspired by the high level of public engagement seen in last year’s independence referendum.The “national conversation” seeks to involve the public in determining the priorities that will be set for the NHS over the next 15 years. It has been welcomed by doctors’ leaders, but they warn that the exercise needs to take account of the pressures on the system if the outcomes …
Govind Rao

Hospital parking: health care's controversial cost - Healthy Debate - 0 views

healthydebate.ca/...hospital-parking-fees

from heather hospital parking fees

shared by Govind Rao on 14 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • by Vanessa Milne, Andreas Laupacis & Mike Tierney (Show all posts by Vanessa Milne, Andreas Laupacis & Mike Tierney) August 14, 2014
  • The issue is large enough that the Ontario government recently promised to cap or cut hospital parking fees. But at the same time, cash-strapped hospitals have grown dependent on the revenue parking provides. And it’s not just a question of fees: some hospitals struggle to make sure their lots have space for patient and visitor parking by doing things like shuttling staff in from off-site parking locations. Still others offer patient-centred services, like valet parking. So what’s working – and what’s not – in hospital parking lots?
  • A Canadian Medical Association Journal editorial addressed parking fees in 2011. “Parking fees amount to a user fee in disguise and flout the health policy objective of the Canada Health Act. … This is parking-centred health care, which is not compatible with patient-centred health care,” wrote interim editor-in-chief Rajendra Kale.
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  • He also cited Scotland, which got rid of most hospital parking fees in 2008. The government saw it as a matter of principle, arguing that hospital parking fees went against the idea of free health care, as well as being a source of stress for patients.
Doug Allan

Dirty hospital rooms a top concern for Canadians - Health - CBC News - 2 views

www.cbc.ca/...hospitals-patient-survey.html

shared by Doug Allan on 09 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • "They couldn't keep up with the amount of time she had to go to the washroom [so] she'd have an accident,"
  • Nearly a third of respondents, who included patients, health-care workers and relatives and friends of patients, said hospital rooms and bathrooms were not kept clean. Stories shared by res
  • Stories shared by res
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  • Karl Rinas, 61, who was treated for a bleeding ulcer at a Leamington, Ont., hospital last February, says he ended up wiping down the bathroom himself after his complaints about the dried liquid waste he found on the floor and toilet seat failed to get a reaction, but he worried about older, less mobile patients.
  • Despite all her efforts, Martin says she has no doubt that the antibiotic-resistant superbug Clostridium difficile infection her mother contracted soon after surgery was related to the hospital's level of cleanliness.
  • "I know everybody nowadays has to work more with less, but to me, a hospital should be absolutely clean," she said.
  • Of the respondents who wrote into the fifth estate's survey about being harmed in hospital, most said the harm was a hospital-acquired infection such as MRSA and C. difficile.
  • Unlike in the food industry, there are no standardized inspections for cleanliness in hospitals.
  • A World Health Organization report that compared Canada's infection data with that of 12 other wealthy countries found that Canada had the second-highest prevalence (11.6 per cent) of hospital-acquired infections after New Zealand — much higher than that of Germany (3.6 per cent) or France (4.4 per cent).
  • Is outsourcing to blame?Those who work in hospitals have pointed to the increased outsourcing of housekeeping in recent years as one reason behind the decline in hospital cleanliness that patients and hospital workers have observed
  • "There's no question there's been an impact on the quality of cleaning, and you can see that throughout the years as various hospitals have struggled with very high-profile superbug outbreaks," said Margi Blamey, spokesperson for the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU), which represents 41,000 hospital cleaning and support staff in B.C.
  • But health authorities in other countries are moving away from private cleaning services. Four years ago, Scotland reversed its decision to allow outsourcing of cleaning and catering services because it felt private contractors were not doing a good enough job keeping the spread of infections in check.
  • Blamey says as long as housekeeping is done on a for-profit basis, employers will reduce the number of staff and cut corners on staff training and cleaning supplies.
  • The Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program is the closest thing to a federal overview that Canada has, but it relies on voluntary reporting by only 54 hospitals in 10 provinces, most of them teaching facilities, which, according to infection control experts, generally have higher infection rates than other acute care hospitals because they tend to see more seriously ill patients.
  • Michael Gardam, who oversees infection prevention and control at the three hospitals that are part of Toronto's University Health Network, agrees that hospitals have fewer resources for housekeeping these days and have to concentrate cleaning on areas that are most likely to transmit bacteria — primarily the surfaces that multiple patients touch.
  • "I probably get more emails about dust bunnies in the stairwells than anything else in the hospital, and yet, we've done that for a reason. You're not going to catch anything from a stairwell, but you're going to catch it from your bed rails," Gardam said.
  • About two-thirds of hospital-acquired infections are preventable, Gardam said, but making a direct link between cleanliness and infection is not as straightforward as it might seem. Some hospital-acquired infections such as ventilator-associated pneumonia or central line-associated bloodstream infections have little to do with the hospital environment and can be controlled through proper protocols around equipment use. But a superbug like C. difficile is a lot trickier because it is hard to pinpoint its source.
  • Increasing cleaning staff on nights and weekends could also help. A typical medium-sized B.C. hospital that contracts out cleaning services has 24 cleaners by day but only four at night, says Blamey, and workers are often not backfilled when ill or on vacation.
  • "Bacteria don't care what time it is," said Gardam.
  • The infection expert says it doesn’t matter whether a private or public entity oversees cleaning; both have had problems with cleanliness. The bottom line is that hospitals generally undervalue the importance of cleaning staff, Gardam said.
  • "People don't really think of them as part of the team, but if you think about how infections are spread in hospitals, they're actually an incredibly important part of the team that goes far beyond just the cosmetic appearance of the room."
  • Doug Allan on 09 Apr 13
     
    CBC story discusses importance of hospital cleaning, and debates demerits of contracting out. 
Heather Farrow

It's not just Scotland's schools. The whole PFI racket is crumbling | Mike Small | Opin... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...d-tax-avoiding-governing-class

privatization p3 international

shared by Heather Farrow on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • he Acronym Soup can get confusing. PPP, PFI, NPD – they are all hurled about, but there will certainly be no alphabet learning for more than 7,000 pupils across Edinburgh locked out of school since the Easter break as building safety standards are assessed and repairs undertaken. The schools were built under the controversial private finance initiative – PFI – by the Labour/Liberal Democrat administration at Holyrood, and there’s now even talk that some of them may need to be knocked down and rebuilt.
Irene Jansen

NHS franchising: the toxic world of globalised healthcare is upon us | Allyson Pollock ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...isation-toxic-world-healthcare

england nhs privatization fraud

shared by Irene Jansen on 30 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • In 2012, parliament in England passed a law effectively ending the NHS by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to secure and provide healthcare for all. From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England, and tax funding will increasingly flow to global healthcare corporations. In contrast, Scotland and Wales will continue to have a publicly accountable national health service.
  • NHS hospitals and services are being sold off or incorporated; land and buildings are being turned over to bankers and equity investors. RBS, Assura, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries that we once owned.
  • The great NHS divestiture, which began in 1990 with the introduction of the internal market and accelerated under the PFI programme, now takes the form of franchising, management buyout and corporate takeovers of our public hospitals. Virgin has been awarded £630m to provide services to vulnerable people and children in Surrey and Devon. Circle has been given the franchise for NHS hospital Hinchingbrooke and is now struggling to contain its debts. London teaching hospitals are merging to give them greater leverage for borrowing and cuts.
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  • Former NHS hospitals, free to generate half their income from private patients, will dedicate their staff and facilities to that end, making it impossible to monitor what is public and what people are paying for.
  • Billing, invoicing, marketing and advertising will add between 30% and 50% to costs compared with 6% in the former NHS bureaucracy.
  • some of HCA's American hospitals are under investigation for refusing care and performing unnecessary investigations and treatment, including cardiac surgery. A decade ago it paid the federal government $1.7bn to settle fraud charges, while former chief executive Rick Scott – now the Republican governor of Florida – managed to avoid prosecution.
  • Unitedhealth, which is currently providing services to the NHS, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement of mischarging allegations in the US; Medtronic paid $23.5m for paying illegal kickbacks to physicians to induce them to implant the company's pacemakers and defibrillators; GlaxoSmithKline and Abbott paid $4.5bn in fines relating to improper marketing and coercion of physicians to prescribe antidepressants and antidementia drugs respectively. Novartis, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Eli Lilly have all paid large fines for regulatory breaches.
Irene Jansen

Flawed, failed, abandoned: 100 P3s, Canadian & International. 2005. - 0 views

cupe.ca/15959

coalition cupe important p3

shared by Irene Jansen on 06 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The report, Flawed, Failed, Abandoned: 100 P3s, Canadian & International Evidence, documents dubious P3 projects in the health, municipal and education sectors, providing examples in provinces across Canada, as well as in Australia, England, Scotland and Wales. I
Irene Jansen

Competition-Based Reform of the National Health Service in England: A One-Way Street? b... - 0 views

papers.ssrn.com/...papers.cfm

nhs privatization trade scotland excellent

shared by Irene Jansen on 21 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • The Conservative-led government in the United Kingdom is embarking on massive changes to the National Health Service in England. These changes will create a competitive market in both purchasing and provision. Although the opposition Labour Party has stated its intention to repeal the legislation when it regains power, this may be difficult because of provisions of competition law derived from international treaties. Yet there is an alternative, illustrated by the decision of the devolved Scottish government to rejectcompetitive markets in health care.
Govind Rao

Scotland's prescription for health: ditch the PFI - Infomart - 0 views

www.fpinfomart.ca/...187522139

from heather p3 privatization Scotland

shared by Govind Rao on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Scotland's prescription for health: ditch the PFI The Guardian Wed Jan 22 2014, 7:36am ET
  • Aberdeen health village( (www.nhsgrampian.org») ), which opened last month, also houses other parts of the public sector: Police Scotland's local sexual forensic unit; a branch of Carerspoint, run by NHS Grampian health board, Aberdeen city council and voluntary organisations, to support unpaid carers; and a healthy living advice service.
Govind Rao

Decades of restructuring hurts morale of Alberta's health care professionals - Healthy ... - 0 views

healthydebate.ca/...rtas-health-care-restructuring

from heather Alberta privatization cuts

shared by Govind Rao on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • by Karen Born, Joshua Tepper & Greta Cummings (Show all posts by Karen Born, Joshua Tepper & Greta Cummings) October 31, 2013
  • This is the second of a two-part series on Alberta’s health care restructuring. This article examines the impact of constant change at the highest levels of administration on those who work within the health care system.
  • Research suggests that health services restructuring impacts health care professionals on the front lines of patient care.
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  • About a decade ago, a series of studies were published based on surveys of over 40,000 nurses from over 700 hospitals in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland and Germany. The study found nurses reported higher rates of burnout and dissatisfaction when they worked in hospitals that had undergone major restructuring and organizational change.
  • Around the same time, researchers in Alberta were asking similar questions about the impact of hospital restructuring on nurses. They noted that “a decade of restructuring and downsizing placed prolonged pressures on the nurses of Alberta.” Surveys of the province’s nurses found that in hospitals where restructuring had taken place, nurses reported higher rates of emotional exhaustion and unmet patient needs.
  • ‘Change fatigue’
  • Confusion about who’s in charge
  • Difficulties in planning for the future
  • Concerns about accountability
  • Health professionals are disengaged
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