Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
On behalf of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, or CPSI, I would like to thank you for the invitation to appear before you and to share our perspectives on antimicrobial resistance in Canada.
My name is Sandi Kossey. With me here today is Ms. Kim Neudorf, a representative of our patient-led volunteer network, Patients for Patient Safety Canada.
First and foremost I wish to express gratitude to Parliament for recognizing the importance of this subject area. We believe that patients should never have to worry about acquiring an infection, and those who do shouldn't have to worry that the treatment that is used to heal them may be ineffective or even harm them. Patients expect that the health care they receive will be timely, appropriate, effective, and perhaps most importantly, safe, and that unnecessary treatments will not be provided and that preventable harms, such as health care-associated infections, will not be considered just routine complications of care.
Health care-associated infections are actually one of the most common adverse events, or patient safety incidents, in health care, and for the most part they are preventable. Antimicrobial-resistant infections are becoming more frequent, as you know, and increasingly difficult to treat. Every infection prevented is an antimicrobial treatment avoided, potentially saving thousands of lives every year.
My colleagues who presented before you in June, and also last week, will have described the complexities of this issue. You are all very aware that antimicrobial resistance is a very serious global public health crisis. We are here to remind you that antimicrobial resistance is also a very significant patient safety issue and thus a public safety issue, and urgent action is required. It is critical to keep this in mind as we develop a coordinated and collaborative approach for Canada to this challenging problem.
Before I address the issue that I was invited here to speak to you about, I would like to take a few minutes to speak about our organization, what we do, and the work we've done to address antimicrobial resistance.
The Canadian Patient Safety Institute was established as the result of a rallying cry led by dedicated individuals working within the health care system who couldn't experience one more incident of a patient being harmed. The Canadian Patient Safety Institute was established by Health Canada as a federally funded pan-Canadian health organization back in 2003. We exist, simply put, because Canadian health care systems simply aren't safe enough.
Patient safety incidents in acute care and home care settings are the third most common cause of death in this country, behind only cancer and heart disease. In 2013, preventable incidents resulted in just under 28,000 deaths across the country. That's the equivalent of one death every 13 minutes—roughly four deaths in an hour, eight deaths during the course of this meeting—that could have been prevented. When it comes to infections as a patient safety issue, the numbers are of grave concern.
Every year it is estimated that 220,000 patients, approximately one in nine, will develop an infection during their stay in a Canadian hospital. An estimated 8,000 of these patients will lose their lives from these health care-associated infections, and as antimicrobial-resistant infections rise, so will this death count.
These are faceless statistics that I'm sharing with you. As we do, I ask this committee to acknowledge the many patients and their loved ones across the country who have felt the tremendous personal impact of a health care-acquired infection—the stress, the confusion, and the anguish that is often devastating and sometimes deadly. That is why I have asked Kim to share her experiences with you. Everything we do at the Canadian Patient Safety Institute is with and for the patients and families that we serve.
Since the creation of CPSI by Health Canada, we have been active in the fight against health care-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance and we have been working to bring tangible solutions. We established infection prevention and control as a national priority, and significant work has been undertaken with several partners to advance an infection prevention and control action plan over the past four years. This was developed through expert stakeholder consensus. The action plan has made considerable progress on three themes: addressing culture and behaviour change, engaging patients in knowledge translation with health care providers, and, most notably, addressing challenges related to measurement and surveillance of health care infections.
This year CPSI was also designated as a World Health Organization collaborating centre on patient safety and patient engagement. We have championed WHO initiatives, spreading global innovations across Canada, the most recognized being infection prevention and control improvement campaigns that target awareness and behaviour change for front-line clinical teams, patients, and the public.
Perhaps most importantly, CPSI was pleased to contribute to the pan-Canadian framework for action prepared by the Public Health Agency of Canada, and we served as a member of the infection prevention and control task group.
In support of the framework for action, and as I have noted, CPSI and our patient partners are coordinating and collaborating on initiatives that address all four essential pillars of the framework: surveillance, infection prevention and control, stewardship, and research and innovation.
We are keenly interested in helping to implement the pan-Canadian framework and its action plan. With that in mind, Mr. Chair, I would like to offer a few recommendations for this committee to consider.
First, CPSI, along with our partners, has identified coordination and good data as one of the top priorities in the battle against infections. Strengthening and coordinating AMR surveillance is critical to developing and implementing resources and improvement efforts at both systems and local levels.
Second, we know that to achieve sustained improvement in public health and patient safety, we need to go beyond the enforcement of standards, beyond education, beyond public awareness. We need strategies to support the implementation of evidence in both policy and practice, and we need interventions that target a change in the attitudes and behaviours of all actors in the system.
Finally, we need to embrace patients as full partners at the table in our collaborative efforts to improve.
With that, I would like to thank the committee for the invitation and the opportunity to speak to you, and I will introduce my dear friend and patient partner, Kim.