Saturday, October 8, 2011

The NHS's Kevin Smith doesn't want to look back, but someone must

CTV reported on Oct.7, 2011:

ST-HYACINTHE — More than 50 victims of a C. difficile outbreak at Honoré-Mercier Hospital five years ago – including the families of 16 people who died – will split a $1 million settlement of a class action law suit.
For the families of those who died, the compensation would be in the range of $25,000 to $50,000, said lawyer Jean-Pierre Ménard.
A coroner's report investigating the deaths between May and November of 2006 was scathing - hands insufficiently washed, rooms improperly disinfected and a serious lack of health and safety guidelines were prevalent at the hospital according to the report.
"Everything that could lack, was lacking here," Ménard said. "Everything that could be mismanaged was mismanaged here."
Honoré-Mercier Hospital officials say things have changed since 2006.
"We work in a totally different manner," said spokesman Claude Dallaire. "We take a lot more precautions and now we have teams to control the spread of infection."
This is the first time in Quebec history people who contracted C. difficile in a hospital were compensated financially.
Were it not for the coroner's report, the case may never have gotten this far because proving culpability is difficult.
For Sylvie Dorion, who spearheaded the class action suit, this settlement puts an end to a long, three-year journey.
Dorion's sister Marie-Andrée was one of the 16 people who died five years ago after the outbreak at the hospital, and the pain of that loss clearly remains.
"My sister was my mother, my friend, my sister," Dorion said. "Oh, I miss her very, very much. I miss her every day."
The suit was more a matter of principal for Dorion, because doing nothing simply wasn't an option.
"I see my sister is looking at me," she said, "and saying it's done now, you can turn the page."
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In light of the above, when will the wrongful death civil lawsuits similarly begin appearing in regards to Niagara's C. diff horror? When will the Jim Bradleys and the Smithermans and the Matthews' be held to account for the deaths of those patients who were killed in the McGuinty Liberal health care monopoly here in Niagara?

It's pathetic (but not unexpected; in fact, predictable) that the NHS's recently-appointed Supervisor Kevin Smith now says he doesn't want to focus on the HIP - and the possible links between the Liberal-mandated HIP and Niagara's C. diff outbreak in 2011's summer of death; coincidentally, the Liberals don't want to focus on that either!!

Smith was mandated to be an administrator - understandably so - but: we also need an INVESTIGATOR to delve into the specific reasons and causes for what led up to Niagara's C. difficile crime-scene in the summer of 2011. This is in addition to what the Ombudsman may or not investigate, and independent of what the coroner may find.

Kevin Smith should have ALREADY called for an independent, separate police investigation into these NHS deaths, and publicly announced that the NHS would completely and openly cooperate in any such criminal investigation.

We didn't hear that from Smith - and this now STINKS of Liberal coverup and pseudo-transparency.
Secretive Liberal Jim Bradley has still not yet demanded a public inquiry, nor a criminal investigation, into the killer Niagara C. diff outbreak, perhaps in order to keep his Liberal monopolism and C. diff complicity out of criminal scrutiny.


The criminal investigation into the Ontario Liberals should focus:

1- on uncovering and explaining the reasons behind the purposefully-forgotten-by-Jim-Bradley's-Liberals'  Nov. 2007 CIHI report, which revealed that St.Catharines had the third-highest patient death rate in Canada

2- on determining how long McGuinty's Liberals had known about the high mortality rate in the NHS


3- and what did they do about it in the meantime (...as patients were dying...), especially since McGuinty's Liberals enforce a monopoly on healthcare in Ontario? Were patients ever given any warning; were they ever given any choice?
Was the Liberals' devotion to state-forced health care monopolism a factor in creating the circumstances of patient death?
Did McGuinty's Liberals do all they could do - seeing as that they ran a no-other-choice monopoly - or, did their enforced monopolism harm Ontarians, by depriving Ontario's patients of choice?

4- on examining what McGuinty's Liberals were saying and doing in 2008 - after hundreds of Ontarians were killed by C. difficile province -wide

5- on examining how McGuinty's Liberals in 2008 avoided and refused to consider any public inquiry into those hundreds of C. difficile  deaths

6- on seeing whether the Liberals' secretive, smug stance to hide from a public inquiry in 2008 deprived Ontarians of a truly objective, independent assessment of the Liberals' health-care promises/claims up until that time (as opposed to the facile 'just trust us' C. diff assurances which McGuinty himself made in 2008, that all was OK)

7- on whether McGuinty and his Liberals were negligent in not calling a public C. diff inquiry in 2008

8- on whether the internal-Liberal-sourced response which Smitherman cobbled together in 2008 (in order to hide from a C. diff inquiry) was in fact "enough" of a preventative "response" - because, as we saw about 3 years later in 2011, another killer C. diff outbreak occurred in Niagara, and, the Liberal-controlled-health-monopoly again acted as if they had NO IDEA how to respond, as if they never knew of, and never learned from, the previous hundreds-of-dead-patients episode from 2008!!

9- on whether the claims made by McGuinty and Co. were true (ie, that no public C. diff investigation was needed, because the Liberals would not learn anything new about C. diff that they didn't already know, as McGuinty himself said in 2008)

10- on whether [in light of the fact that Ontario's health system was a government-controlled MONOPOLY] McGuinty's refusal to call a public inquiry deprived patients of critical, unbiased information regarding the true emergency preparedness and safety of every Liberal-monopoly-controlled hospital, especially those in Niagara

11- on how patients had no other alternatives available to them to arrange for alternative health care choice in Ontario, since all of it was being run under McGuinty's Liberal single-payer monopolist ideology, and, since competition and improvement to the state-run-monopoly was actively politically discouraged

12- on whether the McGuinty Liberals' refusal to call for a public inquiry (and to implement its recommendations) in 2008 led to the C. diff deaths in Niagara  in 2011. Specifically, whether Smitherman's 2008 attempt to skirt a real public C. diff inquiry (and therefore, to pre-empt and to purposefully sabotage the 'best practises' findings which such an inquiry would have brought) was a reasonable mitigation on the part of the Liberal government [...once again, keeping in mind that this was a Liberal monopolist government] or, was it a negligent factor, which directly impacted Niagara three years later - with more deadly results?

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Kevin Smith doesn't really have the time to get into any of that (and neither, btw, does the St.Catharines Standard!) ... and Jim Bradley's Liberals are damn well counting on that.
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1 comment:

bonnideas said...

So what will be done? My father just died from C-Dif last week. He was recovering well in Welland and they decided to transfer him to Ft. Erie where he became ill and three horrible and painful weeks later, he died. This is one of the most painful things I have ever had to go through, watching him waste away, lose his power of speech and suffer so horribly.