Mishap Mansion and Canadian Patient Safety Week
What Patient Safety Mishaps Will You Spot in Mishap Mansion? BC’s health authorities and the BC Patient Safety and Quality Council (BCPSQC) are using Canadian Patient Safety Week (Oct 27-31) and Halloween as opportunities to talk about a scary subject: patient safety mishaps. You’re invited to visit the Mishap Mansion. Once there, you can enter care rooms that are full of patient safety mishaps. Some are intentionally over-the-top (like giant, plastic rats)....
Enterovirus D68 Update
The BC Centre for Disease Control has has confirmed that a young man with a prior history of severe asthma has died with laboratory-confirmed enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) infection . It is uncertain whether EV-D68 caused or contributed to this death. This is the first known death associated with EV-D68 in Canada. You can read more on the BCCDC's D68 web page. Advice for health-care workers Clinicians should consider EV-D68 infections in children...
Ebola information from PHSA
If you work for another health authority, please refer to their procedures. It has been six months since the outbreak of Ebola was declared in Western Africa. To date, there have been no confirmed cases of Ebola in Canada, and the risk to the Canadian general public is very low. Health care workers in Canada, however, could be required to care for a patient with Ebola if a traveller or medical...
Ebola information for healthcare professionals in BC
health-care professionals in BC Health care professionals are advised to be vigilant for illness compatible with EVD in travellers returning from outbreak-affected areas. Basic screening questions include 1) travel to an EVD outbreak-affected area and 2) fever. Consider immediate isolation pending diagnostic testing and results. Strict infection control practices (routine and contact precautions) should be implemented for any suspected case. Ebola virus is transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids, the most infectious being blood, vomitus and feces, or with contaminated...
Emerging Respiratory Viruses
From BCCDC: While the world’s attention is understandably focused on the Ebola outbreak affecting several countries of West Africa, we would also like to remind and update you about several emerging respiratory viruses (ERV) with ongoing global monitoring since our last bulletin of June 17, 2014, including: 1. MERS-CoV. Activity has declined substantially relative to the dramatic surge that occurred in April 2014. However, sporadic cases continue to be reported from affected...
Enterovirus D68 update from BCCDC
Please note: You can find the latest information on EV-D68 on the BC Centre for Disease Control website. BCCDC's bulletin of September 16th commented on neurologic (paralytic) features associated with two of their initial laboratory-confirmed cases of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) in British Columbia. Neurologic symptoms were not at that time considered a prominent feature of EV-D68, for which severe respiratory illness was instead emphasized in initial reports from the United States (US)...
PICNet Website Changes
Welcome to the new PICNet website! The site has moved to a new platform, but the content is still the same; just a few pages have been reorganized. You'll see we have a new Guidelines and Toolkits section, but everything else is in the same place as before. You may, however, need to update any bookmarks you have to our site, as several page URLs have changed. You can navigate to...