The Victoria care home at the centre of a deadly norovirus outbreak has done all it can to prevent the spread of the disease, says the chief medical health officer for Vancouver Island.The deaths of nine elderly residents at the Selkirk Place care facility have been linked to the gastrointestinal virus since the outbreak started three weeks ago .The region's chief medical health officer Dr. Richard Stanwick has been working closely with the care home to manage the outbreak, which infected 100 patients and 50 staff."We have a 16-page protocol. They have followed all of the protocols we have established," said Stanwick.
Selkirk Place has undertaken constant cleaning, quarantining anyone who shows any symptoms, preventing inside and outside visits and monitoring everyone very closely.Despite this, Stanwick said, he's not surprised at the number of deaths."These are highly vulnerable, fragile people who are being successfully nursed through this event."And while nine did succumb, I think that the remainder of the population, it really is a testimony to the staff and to these people, that we've been able to hold it to this point."
Stanwick said 11 people remain on the sick list, and the facility will not be open to the public until it has gone for 48 hours without any new cases.Norovirus — once known as Norwalk virus — is highly contagious and often spreads in places such as schools, cruise ships and nursing homes. The gastrointestinal virus causes bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that can last for a few days.
A new strain of the virus evolves every two or three years; the latest was identified earlier this year and is known as the Sydney strain.There are no drugs to treat norovirus itself, though it is important to drink lots of fluids to guard against dehydration. It is possible to help stop the spread of the virus by cleaning affected environments and Offering High Standard Cleaning Services.
Surgery is scary. It usually involves having your body cut open, and sometimes things go wrong. You react badly to anesthesia, or suffer breathing or heart problems. Or maybe the surgeon nicks a blood vessel, leaves an instrument inside, or even operates on the wrong body part.
Less dramatic but often as serious and far more common is when things go wrong after you leave the operating room. Up to 30 percent of patients suffer infections, heart attacks, strokes, or other complications after surgery and sometimes even die as a result. That’s what happened to Marvin Birnbaum, a retired New York City court reporter, after he developed an infection following hip replacement surgery, his daughter Jacqueline says.
Perhaps scariest of all, though many hospitals now gather data on those problems, patients for the most part remain in the dark about surgical safety. Industry insiders have access to some of that information because hospitals track how well patients do and report results to state and national officials.
Plus, some hospitals submit data to national registries so that they can see how they stack up against one another. But that safety information remains largely hidden from patients.
“The beauty of this approach is that preventable complications correlate with post-operative length of stay,” says Arnold Millstein, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University. He was not involved in our analysis but has studied how hospitals measure and Regular Residential Cleaning Services. “This is about as good as complications measurement can be when using existing claims data,” he says.
Some experts say that may not be good enough. For one thing, factors other than complications can contribute to extended hospital stays. In addition, “we are concerned that the methods used to generate these performance ratings have not been validated against gold-standard measures,” says David M. Shahian, M.D., vice president of the Lawrence Center for Quality and Safety at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They are based on claims data rather than clinical data from patient records.”
Finally, our surgery Ratings are just one indication of a hospital’s performance. “There are a lot of dimensions to hospital quality, and no single measure captures everything,” says Peter Cram, M.D., director of general medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
But we think our Ratings offer vital information to patients and hospitals. “We wish we had access to more comprehensive, standardized information, but this is the best that is available,” says John Santa, M.D., M.P.H., medical director of Consumer Reports Health. “Our surgery Ratings give patients more information so that they can make informed choices before surgery,” he adds. “And we hope that by highlighting performance differences, we can motivate hospitals to improve.”
So Cal Health Services was ripping off taxpayers, part of a pattern of fraud by rehabilitation clinics that collect government funding to help the poor and addicted, a yearlong investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN has found. The investigation, which included undercover surveillance and stakeouts, uncovered a rehab racket that continues to this day.
Thousands of pages of government records and dozens of interviews with counselors, patients and regulators reveal a widespread scheme to bilk the state’s Medicaid system, the nation’s largest. Witnesses to the fraud laid out its inner workings in minute detail, some speaking of it publicly for the first time.
In the underbelly of the Drug Medi-Cal program, clinics pad client rolls by diagnosing people like Byers with addictions they don’t have. They round up mentally ill residents from board-and-care homes to sit in therapy sessions they can’t follow. They lure patients in from the street by handing out cash, cigarettes and snacks. They have patients sign in for days they aren’t there.
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