Safer clinics
It is easy to make an informed decision about where to eat in Ottawa — health inspection records are listed on a city website so consumers can choose to avoid restaurants with dodgy food-safety records. Trying to make the same kind of informed decision about a clinic that will perform an invasive medical procedure has been much more difficult until now.
Now information about how each of Ontario’s 250-plus private clinics did on inspections will be posted on the website of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (cpso.on.ca and follow the link to out-ofhospital inspections under the public register tab). That information will include the names of nine clinics that failed inspections, a college spokesman said Thursday. Two other clinics previously failed but have now corrected problems and their earlier failures will not be noted on the website. In the future all failures will be recorded as will subsequent improvements.
The college’s decision not to record retrospective failures that have since been corrected has been controversial, with reason. Transparency requires all information about clinics to be available to the public, and that should include past failures as well as current status. However, since only two of those 11 clinics fall into that category, most of the information the public needs is available.
The new transparency is something to cheer, especially at a time when growing numbers of procedures are being moved from hospitals into private clinics. That devolution is a good thing for the province — it should both save money and help provide more timely care — but it requires vigilance to make sure patients can be certain high standards are being met by outof-hospital operations. And that can only be done with transparency about inspections.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario began inspecting every out-of-hospital premise in the province in 2010 after the death of a 37-year-old woman who had liposuction at a private Toronto clinic. Until that time clinics were not routinely inspected unless a complaint was filed with the College.
As a result of an inspection, 6,000 patients of an Ottawa endoscopy clinic found to be putting patients at risk by not properly sterilizing equipment were warned in 2011 to get tested. No evidence was found that the faulty procedures made any of those patients sick.
Now clinics that put patients at risk through unsafe and unclean practices will have nowhere to hide. That should encourage healthier practices and give patients more confidence in an important part of the province’s health-care system.