The decision to undergo surgery should never be taken lightly. Today, patients go on the internet and often disturb medical professionals with their grasp of the subtleties involved in medical procedures. It turns out that the patient is always right to ask too many questions.
Infection is highly correlated with hospital stay in Canada. This is a well-known phenomenon in medicine. But a funny thing happens when hospital infection is discussed in a medical negligence trial. All of a sudden the defendant hospital tries to explain away the existence of a hospital acquired infection as some unusual and esoteric cause such as “ICU psychosis” or “withdrawal from paxil”. In one particular case, the judge attributed the acute respiratory distress syndrome as having come from the patient’s own pre-existing sinus infection. Minhas v. Sartor, [2012] B.C.J. No. 1087 at para 258.
What this case shows us is that a well-known hospital-correlated event known in the literature as acute respiratory distress syndrome, is often dismissed as having a non-hospital cause because a defendant medical expert can usually be found to hypothesize a conveniently non-hospital cause like the patient’s own pre-existing condition.
In Ottawa, many patients are aware of the existence of the C Difficile infection. This is a condition so typical of Canadian hospitals that the name was invented for this typically-Canadian hospital infection. The latest Ottawa statistics from the Health Quality Ontario website (www.hqontario.ca) shows approximately 1000 cases of C-Difficile at the Queensway Carleton Hospital between October 1-December 31 2018 (0.41 cases per 1000 inpatient days). The Ottawa Hospital Rehab Centre has a rate of more than 1000 for that same period. The Ottawa Hospital General Campus has approximately 1000 cases for that same period (040 per 1000 inpatient days).
Ontario keeps a registry of such an infection precisely because it tends to be a hospital-acquired infection. The Journal of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (Clostridium Difficile Infection in Acute Care Hospitals: Systematic Review and Best Practices for Prevention volume 38 issue 4, april2017 pp. 476-482) indicates that 75% of C-Difficile is hospital-acquired.
In other words, it is caused by something that is done or not prevented in the hospital. To any reasonable patient, this is caused by the hospital. So patients who are wondering whether what to do about their hospital-caused infection should expect to fact hospital-acquired experts who will say it is probably something you already had before you arrived at the hospital.
As an Ottawa medical malpractice lawyer I always have to be prepared for opposing experts who will swear that the condition my client suffers from was either in her head (psychosomatic) or a pre-existing condition. I regularly have to retain plaintiff experts to explain the state of medical reality to the court.
