Despite an alarming start, my father’s unexpected and sudden hospital stay was relatively uneventful: the nurses were kind, the food was mediocre and the clinical care was excellent. More disquieting was the pile of soiled laundry that sat on the floor of his room for three days. My mother, who had been a nurse, sniffed that in her day this would have been completely unacceptable.
And for good reason. As the chief public health officer of Canada recently reported, more than 200,000 patients acquire healthcare-associated infections every year; more than 8,000 Canadians annually die from them. More than half of -hospital-acquired infections are caused by antibiotic–resistant bacteria such as MRSA and VRE: for C. difficile alone, infection rates increased over 1,000 percent from 1995 to 2009. ((See “The Chief Public Health Officer’s Report on the State of Public Health in...
Katherine Fierlbeck is McCulloch Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University. Her most recent book (with William Lahey) is Health Care Federalism in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
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