‘Unsettling’ discovery made during cancer treatment

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This article was published 04/01/2019 (2625 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AFTER surviving an aggressive breast cancer diagnosed 10 years ago, Jennifer Zyla has relied on intravenous Herceptin treatments every three weeks to keep the disease at bay.

In recent months, however, she’s begun to worry: pumps used to administer the drug at the Buhler Cancer Centre at Victoria General Hospital are more than a year beyond their due date for safety inspections.

“That made me uncomfortable,” said Zyla, who’s been taking Herceptin exclusively for nine years.

“After 10 years, it caught my eye,” she said about the safety inspection due-date stickers.

On May 16, Nov. 21, and an appointment this week, Zyla said she noted infusion pumps bearing stickers saying safety inspections were due Aug. 11, 2017. “I brought it to the attention of a nurse who brought it to the attention of somebody” but, so far, Zyla said, her concerns haven’t been addressed.

She said she goes for Herceptin treatments later in the day, when the cancer centre isn’t as busy, and looks for an available pump to check its sticker.

A spokesman for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said Victoria Hospital leadership investigated Zyla’s concerns and believes it to be a “one-off situation.”

In an email to the Free Press, he said staff are working out a schedule to perform the required preventative maintenance on the pumps, and the risk to patients “is extremely low.”

“The preventative maintenance work on these pumps involves nothing more than checking the battery life — the batteries are rechargeable and the units can also be plugged into the wall — and checking the condition of the power cord.”

The pumps have alarms and error messages that would alert staff if there was ever a malfunction, the WRHA said. “The date does indicate a period for preventative service, but by no means is it an indication of whether or not the equipment is performing properly.”

That stance did not impress Zyla on Thursday.

“To me, it’s unsettling as a patient,” she said. “I don’t know what the process of inspection is” nor why there is a due-date sticker on the pumps if inspections aren’t important.

Zyla takes her treatment seriously. Ten years ago, a six-by-nine-centimetre tumour was found in her left breast and the cancer had spread to her liver and lungs.

“The prognosis was not good,” she said, however, the aggressive, advanced cancer was known to respond well to the drug Herceptin. “Thankfully, I did respond to it.”

Zyla also underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and is now on maintenance Herceptin, going to the Buhler Cancer Centre every three weeks for her 45-minute dose. She goes for cancer tests each year, and is grateful to be “NED” — no evidence of disease.

The WRHA said it has a regional performance assurance management guideline for the preventative maintenance and inspection of medical devices.

“There is a database that tracks the preventative maintenance and assists the clinical engineering staff to schedule devices to ensure that they are inspected on regular basis,” the spokesman said.

“There is also an important role for staff using the devices to notify clinical engineering if and when they ever notice that devices are due for inspection, as indicated on the tag.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca