We take your safety very seriously at St. Joseph's Health Centre. As our patient, we are committed to providing you with quality health care services. When you come to
St. Joseph's for care, you should not be worried about getting sick with an infection you pick up from our hospital environment.

These types of infections are called "hospital acquired infections" and include some names you may have heard about: C. Difficile or CDAD, MRSA, VRE.

To help reduce the chances of you getting these hospital acquired infections, our health care teams are constantly practicing and following infection prevention and control standards.

Paying close attention to the spread of these infectious diseases is a very important step in understanding where safety issues exist and shows us what we need to do to improve. We post information about our infection rates in accordance with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s new reporting framework for patient safety indictors.

But we also show you how we are doing because
we believe it's the right thing to do.

See how we are performing by clicking one of these links:

Clostridium Difficile Associated Diarrhea (CDAD) Rate
Central Line Infection Rate (CLI)
Hand Hygiene Rate
Hospital Standardized Mortality Ratio (HSMR)
Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus Rate (MRSA)
Surgical Safety Checklist
Surgical Site Infection Rate (SSI)
Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus Rate (VRE)
Ventilator Associated Pneumonia Rate (VAP)

Summary of what our C. Difficle (CDI) cases in December 2011 means for you:

	New nosocomial cases of CDAD	CDAD rate per 1000 patient days
December 2011	4	0.42

Summary of what our C. difficle (CDAD) cases in December 2011 means for you:

• We report the number of C. difficile cases in the Health Centre on a monthly basis throughout the year.

• The number of C. difficile cases in December increased to 4 cases when compared to our November results which were 3 cases.

• We are committed to providing the safest care to our patients and we are monitoring our hospital-acquired C. difficile rate closely and working with our clinicians and our front line service workers to ensure that we are doing all the right things, 100% of the time to reduce the risk of a patient developing C. difficile while receiving care at St. Joe’s

There are 4 things that we need to do 100% of the time:

1. Clean Hands Save Lives - Practice Hand hygiene 100% of the time Our health care teams are practicing the 4 moments of hand hygiene every time we approach a patient. This means washing their hands with soap and water and using alcohol-based hand rub when working in an environment with patients who have C. difficile.

2. Make patients and families partners in care - we are educating them about the importance of hand hygiene. You can learn more about this by clicking here.

3. The right drug for the right bug - Practice Antibiotic Stewardship We are making sure we are giving patients the right antibiotic for the right period of time.

4. Ensuring that our hospital environment is kept clean, disinfected and tidy. We achieve this by conducting regular audits of our cleaning processes and making changes as needed.

In addition, each patient who develops C. difficile is carefully reviewed by a mutltidisciplinary team to identity any opportunity for improvement i.e. antibiotic and probiotic utilization, assessment of timely lab samples and patient placement, room cleaning, isolation room practices, hand hygiene.

The rate is calculated as follows:

Number of new cases x 1000 Total number of patient days (for one month)

A full picture of our C. difficile rate:

	New nosocomial cases of CDAD	CDAD rate per 1000 patient days
December 2011	4	0.42
November 2011	3	0.30
October 2011	4	0.39
September 2011	5	0.51
August 2011	1	0.1
July 2011	7	0.74
June 2011	3	0.33
May 2011	2	0.2
April 2011	5	0.5
March 2011	9	0.92
February 2011	11	1.20
January 2011	18	1.74
December 2010	8	0.84
November 2010	5	0.53
October 2010	3	0.31
September 2010	4	0.43
August 2010	6	0.66
July 2010	6	0.64
June 2010	4	0.44
May 2010	5	0.52
April 2010	9	0.97
March 2010	12	1.25
February 2010	12	1.36
January 2010	7	0.70
December 2009	7	0.73
November 2009	8	0.85
October 2009	7	0.75
September 2009	3	0.34
August 2009	2	0.23
July 2009	5	0.55
June 2009	6	0.65
May 2009	13	1.36
April 2009	4	0.42
March 2009	10	1.00
February 2009	6	0.66

 

C. difficile Rate at St. Joseph's Health Centre, Toronto
December 2010 to December 2011

For further information please see Answering Your questions about CDAD.

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Page last updated: January 31, 2012