Two wards at Royal Columbian Hospital will be closed for at least a week, and possibly longer, after an outbreak of the highly infectious bacteria C. difficile.
The hospital declared the outbreak late Wednesday - one in a general medical ward and one in an acute care ward for elderly patients.
The outbreaks have also been posted on the Fraser Health Authority's new "current active outbreaks" page on its website, which is available to the public.
C. difficile causes diarrhea, nausea and dehydration and typically only affects those who are already immune compromised, specifically the elderly or patients who have been on antibiotics for an extended time.
Fraser Health Authority spokesperson Roy Thorpe-Dorward said that the hospital has already begun its infection response process, which includes posting information outside the wards and closing the unit to both admissions and discharges, to limit the spread of the infection.
"Once an outbreak is declared - and that means three or more cases in a unit in a seven-day period - they close the unit to admissions and to discharges and transfers out," he said.
That, he says, is to stop the possibility of an incoming patient contracting the infection, or of an outgoing patient bringing it back with them to their homes or seniors' living facilities.
Patients can begin being transferred into or out of a closed unit after seven days with no new cases and no additional symptoms.
The closure is putting some additional pressure on space in the hospital, but since all 30 beds in the closed general medical ward were full, it hasn't been too much of an impact, says Thorpe-Dorward.
"RCH is certainly busy right now, but - the medical ward unit is currently full, so it is probably less (of a challenge) than if there had been empty beds sitting there when it was closed," he said.
Patients in those units can still receive visitors, but they will be asked to take extra precautions with hand-washing.
The hospital was already scheduled for a "super clean," which started on April 23 and is scheduled to continue until May 20.
That process includes twice daily "twice over" clean-downs using a strong sporacidal bleach.
The same cleaning procedure was recently carried out at Burnaby Hospital, which has been plagued with ongoing C. difficile outbreaks over the last two years. In late February, a letter written by several of Burnaby Hospital's head doctors to the Fraser Health Authority was made public. In it, the doctors said that the hospital had a persistent problem with outbreaks of C. difficile among patients at a rate that topped regional or national averages.
To see the Fraser Health Authority's active outbreaks, go to www.fraser health.ca.
