Today’s comments are selected from Oversight gap at private infusion clinics poses health risk, Ontario documents say by Kelly Grant, who reports that unlike most health-care facilities outside hospitals, infusion centres don’t have to be licensed or inspected.
The treatment rooms at Provis Infusion Clinic in Toronto, are photographed on Oct 24 2018.Fred Lum
It sounds like the clinics are self-imposing high standards. This doesn’t mean there should be no oversight; it’s a matter of time until a sloppy operator focused on profit and not high standards comes along. - Leese1
I’m a regular patient of a General Practitioner with a private practice and several specialists. I’m also a patient of a private infusion clinic. In my experience, the private clinics hire the some of the best medical staff I’ve encountered.This is a lucrative field with huge incentives to do everything right to retain their patients. I would hardly be worried about regulating IV injections. - DollyParker
In response to DollyParker:
Who is paying for your IV treatments? If it is our health care system, then they should naturally regulate the operation in the end. Not on a daily basis, but it should provide the licence and it should be the place you go to if you are not happy with your treatments. It seems very simple. Especially since it’s obvious that it can be a pharmaceutical company that owns and gains from the IV clinic. - KelleJ
In response to KelleJ:
I pay for them, of course. Should I regulate them then? No. I simply take my business elsewhere. The market is providing enormous incentive to maintain safety factors more than sufficient to manage the low risk. Regulations are to prevent unacceptable market failures for which there is no proof. - DollyParker
Government officials are bumping up against the uncomfortable truth that they can’t regulate absolutely everything. At some point, they need to treat doctors and nurses like the professionals they are and allow them to make decisions - gasp - unsupervised. Wait - that’s what they were trained to do. It’s okay. - Doug345
In response to Doug345:
There should always be a regulatory body which oversees treatments in our health field. Too much is at stake, both clinically and financially, not to have this in place. Specially, when it is the pharmaceutical company itself that is running the clinics as in one of the examples. No company should be outside of the regulations of the public system, which in the end pays for all. - KalleJ
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