Bend Bulletin
BEND, Ore. — Therapy dogs are no longer going door to door at local hospitals so patients can pet them from their beds. Instead, some of the dogs are sitting idle because of a new rule that restricts them from entering patients’ rooms.
St. Charles Health System’s new animal policy, which took effect Oct. 1, requires that therapy dogs be restricted to certain locations within the hospital, unlike before, when they could enter patients’ rooms and sit by their beds.
When the health system announced its new animal policy last month, it emphasized that while pets would no longer be allowed in hospitals, therapy dogs and service animals could stay. It did not specify, however, that therapy dogs can no longer enter patients’ rooms.
Therapy dogs, trained and certified to provide comfort to people in a variety of settings, are believed to reduce anxiety and depression, distract from pain and, some say, even lower blood pressure.
St. Charles’ policy has had unintended consequences. Not only are patients largely unaware the dogs are in the hospital — many are battling illnesses or recovering from surgery and are reluctant to leave their beds. It also puts a strain on nurses and other caregivers, who would need to secure the patients in wheelchairs and affix them with the necessary IVs and monitors.
Ruth Loomis, a local veterinarian, learned of the problem after visiting St. Charles Bend this month to test therapy dogs for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a deadly infection caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. MRSA testing for therapy dogs is another new policy at St. Charles, and Loomis voluntarily performs the testing. While she was there, the dogs’ owners told her about the problematic new policy.
“Many of them are frustrated,” she said. “Some of them talked about that they hadn’t even seen a patient in weeks. They show up, but they’re not seeing any patients.”
Therapy dogs’ owners bring their dogs — which undergo a strict certification and 12-hour training process that includes a veterinary screening for parasites — to the hospitals on a volunteer basis. A typical shift lasts several hours.
Pam Steinke, St. Charles’ chief nurse executive and vice president of quality, emphasized that the health system’s main priority in making the change was to keep pets out of the hospitals. Patients’ dogs were posing significant infection-control issues — defecating on carpets, throwing up in elevators and one even biting a caregiver, she said.
“Truly, it was out of control,” Steinke said.
Those issues, however, did not extend to the therapy dogs, which Steinke said were well-trained, regimented and appropriately documented.
St. Charles is now reviewing the policy to try to strike a balance between taming the chaos and allowing patients to benefit from the animals, Steinke said.
“We really do have a belief that this is a valuable and valid program, so we have to figure out what works,” she said. “We’re evaluating.”
Representatives from a number of other hospitals, including Providence, Legacy and PeaceHealth, which collectively operate 17 hospitals in Oregon, said both therapy dogs and service animals are permitted in patients’ rooms.
Service animals, which are trained to assist people with disabilities, are permitted at St. Charles on a case-by-case basis, depending on the animal and medical condition, Steinke said.
“If the service animal belongs to a patient, the patient doesn’t need the service animal usually in the hospital,” she said. “They have other people to watch them or help guide them.”
Service dogs for anxiety, for example, would not be allowed in patients’ rooms, Steinke said.
“If it’s a service dog because ‘I have social anxiety,’ well, you can’t have them in your room with you,” she said, “and if we have to do medications or whatever, we’ll have a care plan that addresses that.”
Steinke emphasized that St. Charles’ animal policy, which applies to all four hospitals in the region, aligns with guidelines form the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention around infection control and minimizing exposure to pet dander and hair.
Billie Smith, the executive director of Cheyenne, Wyoming-based Therapy Dogs Inc., an organization for therapy dog owners, said keeping therapy dogs in waiting areas is “extremely problematic” from an infection-control standpoint. It requires patients to leave their sterilized rooms and enter hallways and waiting areas, where there could be children, or, as Smith calls them, “germ factories.”
“You’re taking that patient out of their safe zone directly into the war zone, as far as infection control goes,” Smith said.
Steinke said patients at risk of infection wouldn’t be permitted to go in the waiting areas where the dogs are kept. Plus, it’s easier to clean and disinfect a waiting area than entire hallways and rooms, which staff had to do when people took dogs all over the hospital, she said.
Moving patients to other areas of the hospital to use therapy dogs also exposes the health system to liability in case patients get injured, Smith said. And it’s a problem from a staffing perspective, as it’s time consuming to move patients.
Additionally, patients in hospitals typically don’t want to move, Smith said.
“If you have to get out of bed and trudge all the way down the hall to the family waiting room, who’s going to do that when you feel poopy?” she said.
Loomis said she hopes St. Charles reverses the policy, as she hates to see patients go without visits from the dogs.
“It’s not that administrators are coldhearted or anything, but I think that when you’re not actively seeing what’s happening on the floor, these decisions seem to make sense. ‘We’ll put the dogs here and people can see them if they want to,”’ she said, “but I think that they are not giving credence to the significant benefit of having a pet visit.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
