Family angry it wasn’t told of hospital’s C. difficile rate
Senior contracted infection three times during eight- month stay
Relatives of a Vancouver man who contracted C. difficile last year at Burnaby Hospital and later died are angry they were not informed earlier that the hospital had high rates of the bacterial infection.
Bhinder Rampuri, 73, died Feb. 8 after spending most of the previous eight months at Burnaby Hospital receiving treatment for spinal problems, liver cancer, his prostate and various bacterial infections.
His son, Roger Rampuri, acknowledged there is no way to prove that his father died because of C. difficile. His father was cremated so there can be no autopsy. “But if the doctors and nurses and Fraser Health and the government knew that this virus was this bad,” said Roger Rampuri, “why were we not advised?”
The grieving son said his father developed C. difficile at least three times at Burnaby Hospital, including the week before his scheduled discharge in early February.
“If someone develops C. difficile once, twice, three times, why would they not move him to a different hospital and remove him from an environment that was slowly killing him?”
Roger Rampuri said he only learned about the C. difficile problem at the hospital after media reported rates of infection there have been two to three times the national average.
The Rampuri case was raised in the B. C. legislature Monday by Opposition leader Adrian Dix, who said the family is “obviously concerned about the level of information available to them and the community about the spread of C. difficile at Burnaby Hospital.”
Dix asked why it took news reports to prompt the Health Ministry to “provide adequate information to people in the community about the problems at Burnaby Hospital.”
Finance Minister Kevin Falcon said he would take Dix’s question “on notice” on behalf of the Health Minister Mike de Jong who was not in the legislature.
Earlier in the day, de Jong was at Burnaby Hospital, speaking with medical staff and then reporters. Asked why the public was not informed earlier that 84 patients with C. difficile had died at the hospital between 2009 and mid- 2011, de Jong said B. C. hospitals are becoming more transparent and posting rates of infection online for the public.
Fraser Health spokesman Roy Thorpe- Dorward said Burnaby Hospital has had a policy for several years of posting rates of infection in medical units where an outbreak has been recorded. “So if someone is in a unit with an outbreak or is transferred into that unit, they will get the information at that time.”
Thorpe- Dorward said Fraser Health is moving toward posting hospital- wide infection rates rather than just rates for specific units. “The call for more information and transparency is a message that we are hearing loud and clear and we are moving toward it, for sure.”
De Jong told a news conference the high rates of C. difficile at Burnaby Hospital can be partly linked to the aging facility’s lack of bathrooms. “If you have four patients in a room as opposed to one patient or two patients, they’re sharing the same bathroom. That is a challenge.”
Data show newer hospitals have a lower rate of C. difficile infection than dated facilities, he added. “So ultimately the redesign, the redevelopment of this campus, is going to be necessary.” But an extensive renovation is several years away so “in the meantime we have to make sure that infection rates continue to drop.”