One extra cleaner per ward means fewer patients with MRSA and cash savings for hospitals

A recent British academic study found that lives and millions of pounds would be saved if hospitals took on just one extra cleaner per ward.

The study, sponsored by the public sector union UNISON, found that an extra cleaner had a measurable effect on the clinical environment, cutting the number of patients who contracted MRSA and saving an estimated £30,000 to £70,000 per hospital (that's about $48,000 to $112,000 at current exchange rates).

Microbiologist Dr Stephanie Dancer carried out in-depth research into MRSA and cleaning at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow.

The findings revealed that enhanced cleaning led to a 32.5% reduction in microbial contamination at hand-touch sites, while cases of MRSA fell in the six months of targeted cleaning on one of the wards. They rose again when the extra cleaner moved to another ward, which in turn saw the number of cases fall. Dr. Dancer’s study was published in BMC Medicine.

The Ontario government might want to look into this, rather than continue their policy of cutting hospital support staff. Given that in Ontario, C. Difficile is also skipping through our hospitals, the improvements might even be more significant.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, can be found here, and the UNISON release, here.

dallan@cupe.ca

Comments

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog