MUHC WORKERS WORRIED
Patients not at risk, hospital claims
PROTESTING BUDGET CUTS
About 100 people demonstrated Wednesday outside Montreal General Hospital, including patient and former employee Heather Allen Evans, left, and medical secretary Nina Cammisano, right. Facing a deficit, the McGill University Health Centre is cutting ties with a family clinic and eliminating a special C. difficile cleaning squad.
As part of a cost-cutting operation, the McGill University Health Centre is eliminating a special housekeeping squad devoted to eradicating C. difficile and other potentially deadly pathogens from patient rooms.
The MUHC set up the 10-person squad following the epidemic of Clostridium difficile-associated infections at the Montreal General Hospital in 2003-04. More than 1,200 Quebecers died after contracting C. difficile diarrhea across the province during that epidemic, according to government figures.
Richard Fahey, director of public affairs at the MUHC, confirmed that the so-called grey squad will be eliminated as part of a plan to slash $50 million in spending in 20132014. However, Fahey disputed claims by union leaders that cutting the squad will place patients at risk.
“This was a pilot project that was not financed by the government,” he explained. “We wanted to find ways to eliminate C. difficile and other infections.
“We’ve learned from that (experience) and we will train all the housekeeping people to act in the same way.”
But John Panagos, a health and safety delegate for the McGill University Health Centre Employees Union, argued that the grey squad is absolutely essential in reducing the rate of hospitalacquired infections.
Panagos acknowledged that all MUHC housekeeping staff already do an excellent job in cleaning patient rooms, along with their other duties. But the 10 workers assigned to the grey squad work exclusively at removing pathogens and provide that extra layer of protection that patients need and that makes all the difference, he said.
“Because of all the mismanagement of money over the years, we end up suffering,” he added. “And it’s not just the employees who will be affected, but the patients, too.”
Jeff Begley, a union leader, challenged the MUHC’s contention that the support staff cutbacks will not affect patient care.
“When patients come to the hospital, they have every expectation that the environment will be healthy,” he said. “If they start cutting back in housekeeping, that environment can no longer be healthy.”
More than 100 unionized workers of the 4,800-member union demonstrated outside the Montreal General Wednesday afternoon.
“No more cuts! No more cuts!” they chanted as they walked up and down Côte des Neiges Rd.
On Tuesday, The Gazette reported that the MUHC will sever its ties with its family medicine clinic in NotreDame-de-Grâce in what used to be the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the hope of saving several hundred thousand dollars a year.
The MUHC union, affiliated with the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, commissioned a report that recommends that the hospital network could save money by cutting managers.
The report, by the firm MCE Conseils, noted that the MUHC increased its management ranks by 27 positions last year, compared with the Centre hospitalier de l’université de Montréal, which boosted its number of executives by six.
The decision to slash $50 million in spending comes after the government made public a damning report into the MUHC’s finances in December.
That report projected that the MUHC is facing a “realistic” $115-million deficit, greater than the shortfalls of all other Montreal hospitals combined.