WRH Ouellette campus forced to cancel scores of surgeries
Some procedures to be moved to Met after sterilization process goes awry
Windsor Regional Hospital will cancel an average of 40 to 50 surgeries a day at its Ouellette campus — for everything from cataracts to breast cancer — as it searches for the weak link in its sterilization process.
CEO David Musyj said the hospital actually cancelled 70 surgeries on Tuesday. It has also stopped taking trauma patients until the issue is resolved.
Patients with scheduled surgeries will likely get a call the day before if cancellation is required.
“We’re going to take it day by day calling patients,” Musyj told reporters Tuesday. “I don’t want to promise we’re going to have a solution, that we’re going to have the issue and solution within 24 hours. We could identify the problem, and then solving the problem could take a long time, too. So we don’t have a timeline on how long it is going to take.”
The operating room executive committee made the call Monday night to cancel all elective or scheduled surgeries after staff started noticing a “scorching substance” left over from the sterilization of surgical instruments. They don’t know what the substance is or what is causing it.
Musyj said Tuesday about 20 surgeries were moved to the Met campus, which isn’t having the problem.
Anything that can’t be done at Met will be postponed until the problem is fixed.
“We’re going to try to maximize our surgical capacity as best we can at our Met campus,” he said. “The problem is there are certain surgical procedures, say for instance neurosurgery, which we cannot physically do at Met.”
Musyj said the Ouellette campus has also stopped accepting trauma patients requiring surgery.
“They’ll be either redirected to London, Toronto or Detroit as the case may be,” said Musyj.
He said staff started noticing a problem about 10 days ago.
The hospital’s sterilization unit, officially called the Medical Device Reprocessing Department, puts dirty instruments through a wash, then decontaminates them with chemicals. After that, the instruments are dried and put on trays with blue and white cloths. The instruments are wrapped and steamed at around 130 C for half an hour. Then the instruments are cooled and wrapped.
Musyj said hospital staff recently discovered “scorching” or brown staining on the white cloths. Initial lab results show it’s not iron or rust.
Despite not knowing the cause, Musyj said human error isn’t the problem. It “is caused by something externally impacting our internal operations,” he said.
The hospital is getting the cloths examined and working with equipment manufacturers to find the source of the problem. Musyj said they also had a third party sterilize instruments off-site and bring them in.
“Unfortunately the instruments that we had sterilized by them also continued to have a similar problem,” said Musyj. “So we’re examining again why. There’s a chance that whatever chemicals or combination of issues are still with our instruments that we have, and we’re going to have to address that situation once we find the source of the problem.”
The hospital also brought in a sterilization expert from Georgia.
“They’re testing our water, they’re testing our steam,” said Musyj. “They’re testing the whole system from start to finish, so water coming into our system, water going from our powerhouse into our sterilization system and then leaving the system as well.”
This is the second time this summer that the Ouellette campus has had to cancel surgeries. Most operating rooms were shut down in June after a new part had to be ordered for the steam system.
Musyj said officials are also checking to see if what was done to fix the previous problem has caused the current one.
“Could it be a water issue? Possibly,” he said. “It’s all speculation right now.”
Musyj said he understands that patients are anxious and the lack of clarity on a timeline isn’t helping.
Patients will be re-booked as quickly as possible once the problem is fixed, he said, and days in the operating room will be extended. That’s already happening at Met in an attempt to ease the burden.
“Frustrating, definitely for our patients and families, clearly,” said Musyj. “A lot of the patients and families have these surgeries scheduled well in advance and then have to be told they’re cancelled. That’s very frustrating for them. However, everyone is trying to err on the side of patient safety. The last thing you want to do is move ahead with a surgical procedure and risk that.”
This is a problem that should be eliminated with construction of the new mega-hospital, said Musyj, because the new facility will offer backup systems and the ability to do all surgeries under one roof.
“We’ll have redundant systems within the whole process,” he said. “Right now we don’t have any redundant systems. One site goes down, the whole thing goes down. So if we have sterilization issues, it’s the whole sterilization issue, it’s one system. In the future there will be backup systems and redundant systems in one facility.”