Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­is­tered Nurs­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TTR­NA) Idi Stew­art is call­ing for “heads to roll” fol­low­ing the deaths of sev­en ba­bies at the Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Unit (NICU) at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian, Stew­art said the as­so­ci­a­tion want­ed to see who would be held re­spon­si­ble.

He said when good things oc­cured, there was a pletho­ra of peo­ple to thank, but the op­po­site when things went wrong.

He said, “The as­so­ci­a­tion would be look­ing for which mid­dle man­age­ment and up­per man­age­ment would be held re­spon­si­ble for such a de­ba­cle. Some­thing like this: one could un­der­stand one ba­by, pos­si­bly two, and worst-case sce­nario three, but sev­en is to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able.

“Those in­fec­tions are sup­posed to be mon­i­tored. Those hos­pi­tal-ac­quired in­fec­tions are some­thing that every hos­pi­tal must do on an on­go­ing ba­sis; they must have a record of pos­si­ble in­fec­tions with­in any area, es­pe­cial­ly ar­eas like the in­ten­sive care units.”

He said the in­ci­dent raised con­cerns about oth­er ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties at health in­sti­tu­tions; some of them in­clude med­ical staff (not nurs­es) en­ter­ing ster­ilised ar­eas with un­ster­ilised cloth­ing.

“We would al­so want to call on some of our med­ical col­leagues, nurs­ing per­son­nel, for in­stance, who do not and are not al­lowed to walk the hall­ways of the hos­pi­tal with their in­ten­sive care out­fits on. You re­main with­in your de­part­ment, and if you’re leav­ing your de­part­ment, you take off your cov­er­all. We have wit­nessed... and we would def­i­nite­ly call up­on oth­er cat­e­gories of per­sons to dis­con­tin­ue walk­ing in and out of these de­part­ments, which are sup­posed to be very ster­ilised.”

On Fri­day, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh apol­o­gised to the par­ents of the sev­en ba­bies who died of neona­tal sep­sis at NICU be­tween April 4 and 7.

He said that the North-West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) has al­ways im­ple­ment­ed strin­gent in­fec­tion pre­ven­tion and con­trol prac­tices, which are stan­dard in the NICU.

“Im­me­di­ate­ly up­on recog­nis­ing the se­ri­ous­ness of the sit­u­a­tion, ex­ist­ing es­ca­lat­ed pro­to­cols were ini­ti­at­ed by the NWRHA. These in­clud­ed, in­ter alia, rig­or­ous sani­ti­sa­tion and ster­il­i­sa­tion. I am ad­vised that se­nior doc­tors and nurs­es were present, pro­vid­ing care to the neonates, and par­ents were reg­u­lar­ly up­dat­ed on their ba­bies’ con­di­tion,” he told Par­lia­ment.

When the Sun­day Guardian mes­saged Deyals­ingh, he re­ferred us to the NWRHA. The chair­man of the NWRHA, Lisa Agard, could not be reached for com­ment.

Stew­art said since the in­ci­dent, there has been an in­crease in the deep clean­ing of in­ten­sive care units across all re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties. While he wel­comed that, he said con­stant and con­tin­u­ous up­keep is need­ed.

Re­gard­ing Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, he said the fact that it was an old build­ing con­tributed to the ease at which in­fec­tions could spread. That, he said, cou­pled with a gen­er­al low ra­tio of nurs­es to pa­tients con­tributed to the spread of hos­pi­tal-re­lat­ed in­fec­tions.