Dirty hospitals: Hidden camera investigation (CBC Marketplace)

this week on marketplace dirty hospitals some hospitals are a real freaking disaster Canada's first undercover hospital cleaning test two days later their insiders paint a not so pristine picture there was feces on the floor kilos for more than two hours you think you're getting better and up getting sicker this has to stop this is Canada we look for answers why isn't cleaning more of a priority if it's so crucial we're taking our hidden cameras into hospitals secretly applying a special gel used by some hospitals to test cleaning see how it glows only visible under a UV light if we come back 24 hours later and the gels still there it hasn't been cleaned cleaning is key to keeping deadly infections from spreading to patients so we gel areas that get touched a lot places that should be cleaned often we'll have the result later to meet someone who knows too well why hospital cleanings crucial we head to the small town of Stevensville in southern Ontario where Denise ball lives last year when Denise's husband Gary is in the hospital she notices some questionable cleaning they would come in and wash the washroom and come through and there was in his particular room a sink and soap dispenser and they'd be washing that with the same rag and I thought this was a filthy thing to do so after that I just watched like a hawk recording now wait don't the ground Gary 63 years old when this videos taken last winter a retired schoolteacher active and healthy this is Gary what he does when it's too much snow on the deck all that changes last April when he's admitted here at Niagara general with pancreatitis he spends three days in emerg where he catches pneumonia before getting a bed on a ward soon after Denise is told she now has to wear a gown and gloves to enter Gary's room so I put him on and I went into his room and I said what's going on and he said I don't know I they said my room is tagged cuz I have seen difícil that goes how did you catch that he goes I don't know turns out Gary was put on the same floor as patients who have C difficile a life-threatening super bug hi everybody how did he get difficile who ever came to help him more cleaning staff washing there's rails I mean that's how they explained to to us how it could be get caught Gary's got what's called a hospital-acquired infection I'll say by a problem in hospitals across the country oh great health officials try to contain the spread of c.difficile nearly 100 people in Montreal and Calgary is also prevalent doctors at Burnaby general says the rate of C difficile infections is two to three times the national average in fact 250,000 patients across Canada get life-threatening infections while in hospital every year more per capita than the u.s. any other developed country up to 12,000 people die the fourth leading cause of death in Canada to get his take on how poor cleanings playing out we head to Toronto General Hospital to meet up with infectious disease specialist dr. Michael Garden hey doctor Garden okay how important is Hospital cleaning for infection control hospital cleanings huge it's one of the most important things we have to control infections in hospitals I can pass C difficile on to a patient if I don't clean my hands but they can also pick it up from the bed rails that cleaning becomes absolutely critical and yet across Canada in recent years hospitals have cut the proportion they spend on cleaning one way many are saving is by privatizing cleaners or their management we track down a cleaning supervisor a nurse and this hospital cleaner all risking their jobs to speak out they've really cut stuff and we don't have a lot of time to actually get done what we're supposed to get done in the day we used to have one person to one wing of the hospital to clean but now we have three floors to clean three times the work in the same amount of time you don't get the time to actually move everything the furniture the proper time of letting the cleaners sit long enough we should be taking more time to let them dry naturally because you really need that time to let it disinfect then there's the mopping the chemical solution in the mop and bucket is not being changed why they don't have the time they just simply don't have the time so they leave the same dirty water in the bucket go to another room yes have you seen that it's common practice there's a shortage of cleaning supplies - I've seen a clean em up before so she's cleaned up infected patient rooms and then she's gone down the hallway cleaning because she didn't have enough mops to change using the same mop he's even more in a non-infected room no not in common areas she's just cost contaminated the whole liver so just knowing that I was actually clean it would all be classified this training I watched him washing quickly around and I mean quickly how quickly it did they oh well you know kind of up in the air and they spend 45 minutes cleaning the room oh gosh no 10 minutes if that 10 minute that for a room that's infected with C difficile Hospital cleanings not like any other type of cleaning surfaces have to be absolutely spotless bacteria-free so to test how long it takes to thoroughly clean after a patient sent home we enlist a cleaner at this Toronto Hospital to show us how it should be done we time the job to clean this room properly just over an hour but in reality how much time on average our cleaners getting 15 minutes 15 minutes that may explain this this and yep that's a mouse another way privatized cleaning companies save money at some hospitals after 3:30 p.m. just one cleaner in the whole hospital and you'd better hope there's not a cleaning emergency reasonably patient had an accident at CSIS on the floor we cleaned it up the best because but you still need somebody to come and pass a mop with the actual cleaning they had to wait two hours there was feces on the floor yes for more than two hours until a cleaner could come yeah if it was somebody that had an infection this would be sitting on the floor and the nurses are walking in and out of the room so we'll be taking that to another room and all down the hallway we share what we hear with infectious disease expert dr. Michael garden after 3:30 there's one cleaner for the entire Hospital the entire Hospital kind of day/night difference is very common and it makes no sense cleaning a room you would expect that to be able to happen 24 hours a day and it has to happen 24 hours a day because the bacteria really don't give a damn whether it's day or night yet look what our hidden cameras find in this room with a patient infected with a superbug smears on the wall that we're told have been there two weeks and we hear basic equipment isn't cleaned properly either like IV poles they're supposed to go to the dirty utility to be washed properly most times they don't these are IV poles that people hole - and they haven't been properly cleaned no or sterilized no you just mean what surface would same goes for commodes even ones that have been used by an infected patient so the person who's infected has used the commode and then somebody else has to use the same commode yes it doesn't get sterilized in between no it's just gets what done by the no she does that kill everything no it just kills to be a minimum but you don't know what else is on there check out these pictures taken by a patient's family in Ontario st. Catherine's hospital last summer feces stuck to the wheels of this commode I visited hospitals all over Canada and the variation is actually striking right they shouldn't give me some standard of care some hospitals are a real freakin disaster a freaking disaster they've been told to actually cut their number of housekeeping staff by outside auditors who are trying to help them balance their budgets okay the cleaning stuff yeah and frankly when I was hospitalized I was pulling out the disinfectant wipes and I was wiping down surfaces in my room still fighting the C difficile he picked up at Niagara general Gary ball is in and out of hospital the pain is subsided hopefully within an hour so the hell out of here you can't beat the superbug he just couldn't get healthy enough it has a decedent because of the c diff and even the doctors their head said it was the complications of the c difficile that caused all of this one night he collapses at home is rushed back to niagara general and my sister-in-law was already there and she shook her head no at me and I just fell straight down that's not really true Kerry do you think he was let down oh yes really let down if it was the other way around he would be fighting saying this has to stop this is Canada and and people go into the hospital to get well and you're having them come out and and being sick when we come back the results of Canada's first undercover cleaning test we're shining a light on dirty hospitals Canada's first undercover cleaning test remember that harmless gel we applied 24 hours earlier to places people touch a lot we're checking to see if it's been cleaned off if it hasn't it will glow under our UV flashlights some of the gel has been cleaned away but most surfaces we gel here and in all the hospitals we test haven't been cleaned we show some of our footage to infectious disease expert dr. Michael garden this is on a handrail just down the hallway from inpatient surgery so how long had that been sitting there 24 hours yeah look at it all yeah so chances are nobody's clean that is that a concern this is something that patients might be touching as they're as they're walking down the hallway anything that's sitting in an inpatient environment like that that's been around for 24 hours is obviously worrisome next a visitor's room on an acute patient care ward the door handle isn't cleaned neither is the light switch these are things people touch with their hands where do their hands go or they go to their loved one so these are the kinds of things that we really focus on trying to have cleaned regularly next we go inside a washroom shared by four patients taps not clean is it acceptable to you to see this in a patient's bathroom more than 24 hours later shared washrooms need to be cleaned really well at least twice a day we worry a lot about washrooms shared washrooms I think there are probably one of the major ways that things are actually spreading patient to patient this was on award for infectious patients I would suggest you could probably find examples of this and pretty much every hospital in the country Denise ball didn't just lose her husband Gary to a hospital-acquired infection she lost confidence in hospitals I'm afraid to go to the hospital even today you don't know what you're walking into in the weeks after Gary ball catches c.difficile here niagara general hospital and others in the region declare outbreaks or the 30 people have died in the Niagara region alone the province steps in the Ontario government takes over it's a largest hospital system because of an outbreak so we head to this Hamilton hospital to meet the man appointed by the government to get Hospital outbreaks in the Niagara Region under control Kevin Smith I'm Kevin nice to meet you nice to meet you why our hospitals cutting back on cleaning I don't think they're necessarily cutting back I think they're experimenting with new models of cleaning well we interviewed a cleaner who used to clean one floor per shift now she has to clean three floors per shift how was it possible that she could be properly cleaning so obviously I don't know the place or the hospital of the individual but let me one of your hospitals one of our hospitals okay she says it's the same job but less time that doesn't resonate with what I'm hearing in terms of how we're making investments how we're bringing in new technologies I talked to say they are overworked they want to do a better job but they feel that they are handcuffed they can't actually do the job they need because they don't have the time they don't have the resources some of them don't have the training why isn't cleaning more of a priority if it's so crucial yeah I don't think you could make it more of a priority than it is currently at the Niagara houses I'm sorry wait time to say it doesn't seem to be so obviously I need I need the workers to be talking to me more than you frankly and I need to go back and figure out why would they feel that way and I haven't heard that message I have heard in some staff meetings that were rushed and that doesn't is it for cleaners it's for nurses it's for doctors everybody's feeling rushed in health care but listen to this one reason cleaners in particular are feeling crushed get a lot of pressure from above to turn that room over and one of the reasons that you have to turn it over is I believe it's $500 is given extra to the hospital if the person's out by 11 o'clock or 2 o'clock in the afternoon the hospital gets extra money if they get a patient out of the room before 11:00 a.m. yep seems hard to believe but remember the uproar over hospital wait times patients are kept on stretchers when they should be in beds and in chairs when they should be in stretchers some patients have waited so long that they've called 911 from the ER just to get medical attention some provinces have come up with a plan to cut those weights like BC Ontario where the hospital gets hundreds of dollars from the province for every patient it gets out of emergency and into a bed within a certain time how does that affect cleaning this pressure to get a patient out of a bed I've had the patient come up but the bed isn't cleaned yet nobody has been in there so now you need this person to come and clean this bad because you have a patient in a hallway waiting for a bed and that's when the beds got cleaned really quickly do you think corners get cut yeah I have a patient in the hallway so they're not gonna do a store job as they suppose it isn't oh I just want to be mercenary and get a bit more money for the hospital this is this money is to incent behaviors that improve quality of care what does it make if you bring a patient into a bed so you cut the wait times at the expense of giving that patient a potentially deadly disease of some sort by no means what am I suggesting that in order to meet the target should we skimp on our performance and the target system isn't set up like that but there is on the creator's say that there's a lot of pressure that they have to turn the beds over and it's rush rush rush that there is a lot of pressure but I would tell you that certainly will I've been supervisors it's about providing high quality cost-effective care it's about something else too as cleaners scramble to prep beds for the next patient guess who benefits the CEO gets a big bonus for his Hospital being one of the tops and cutting wait times and moving people around the CEO is benef because of this and putting potentially patients at risk yeah I think that pay-for-performance in general doesn't work very well what I would like to see is you can pay for performance but I would like to see it based on a number of measures not just wait times it can't just be about how many you do it also has to be about that you're doing them safely Kevin Smith's also a CEO for a group of other hospitals so do you get a bonus I do all the bonuses are tied to metrics and one of the metrics is what's your infection rate like so if you got a really short wait list and a really big infectious disease bump there is no bonus coming Smith's contract says he's eligible for an extra 15% on top of his salary when we come back a test on this CEOs home turf we have gelled this hospital okay we're investigating how dirty hospitals can make you sick getting answers from the man appointed to clean up hospitals in the Niagara region after C difficile outbreaks CEO Kevin Smith an infectious disease expert we interviewed dr. Michael garden has described cleaning in some hospitals as a freaking disaster I agree with Michael I think that's true he'll know that he's been at our hospital and said you're doing a great job you're doing exactly what I'm told you to do we're not I'm not worried about the Niagara Health System you're actually among the leaders of the province now well we took hidden cameras into the three largest hospitals in the Niagara Health System Niagara general wellin and st. Catharines first up Welland this is a hand drill that's right outside a patient's room who's in isolation and where it glows it hasn't been cleaned so there it is I'm obviously very disappointed to see that that is a less than optimal cleaning opportunity we need to fix a cleaner we spoke to said there used to be someone who sold job all day was to go around cleaning off these high touch areas handrails elevator buttons door handles and now we're lucky if those things get cleaned once a week so I would say if the standard is once a day then it has to be once a day next we show him a public washroom in niagara general the hospital where gary ball got c difficile the support rail 24 hours after we applied gel c mm-hmm that hasn't been cleaned nope you're right okay so obviously then you've got some data that we need to improve our performance and then we reveal we have gelled this hospital okay yesterday we came in and we gelled some high-touch areas in this hospital and I'm wondering if you would like to come and we can take a look and see it it's been cleaned I would like to do that and so we head back to places we've gelled more than 24 hours earlier so what do you think we're gonna find well I'm hoping we're gonna find a great clean environment some of the surfaces we gelled has been cleaned but not most of them first stop a ward with highly contagious infectious disease patients see this if we put this on more than 24 hours ago and it hasn't been cleaned concerning absolutely concerning and this is the handrail that patients grip absolutely you're absolutely right next so here we are this is contact precaution so this is an isolation room and the railing outside of this room is still not clean and you pasted there yesterday yes more than 24 hours ago and this was supposed to be our standard supposed to be cleaned over 24 hours we have some work to do obviously you've uncovered an opportunity for improvement if it comes down to we need more cleaning we need more clean herbs then we're going to have to go back to our budget table and say what are we going to do less of to do this back in Stevensville Denise ball is left only with memories and anger they just don't get it and maybe until one of their loved ones that went in and they can count a few months later and they're going to their grave maybe that's what will wake them up you

Channel: CBC News

Views: 538,362

Keywords: CBC News, CBCNews, CBC broadcasting media, public broadcasting news, Canadian News, Canadian Broadcasting Corportation (TV network), CBC News Network, hidden camera, hospitals, c difficile, hospital acquired infections, Infectious Disease (Medical Specialty), health care

Id: UIOHKrfzJzI

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2015