A four-legged health-care team at Vancouver Coastal Health has onboarded two new recruits.
Brothers Arti and Anton, both English Springer Spaniels, have joined the Canines for Care program.
Following thousands of hours of training, the dogs are officially certified to use their noses to sniff out unseen threats in a hospital: everything from bacterial and viral infections to cancer.
“They will be excellent scent detectors — using the power of their nose to make the invisible, visible,” says Teresa Zurberg, co-founder and program research and innovation lead.
Canines for Care is led by a group of medical professionals, infection prevention and control practitioners and the team of seven dogs.
“When the people see the dogs coming in and searching, it creates a whole new level of excitement,” says Zurberg, noting the program was inspired by a similar initiative in the Netherlands.
Staff have seen success around detecting C. difficile in the health-care environment. It’s one of the top causes of hospital-acquired diarrhea and can be fatal. Since the program’s launch in 2016, the canine team has worked in 32 different hospitals. .
“The dogs are able to tell us… where those sources of contamination are in the environment, and people are unable to do that,” says Zurberg, noting five of the seven dogs specialize in C. difficile detention and two of them are research dogs learning new pathogen scent detection.
“Our dogs are able to find C. diff every day.”
When they are out screening and a dog locates the disease, cleaning staff along with infection control staff are right there to remove the contamination.
“We're able to get on that right away and clean and disinfect,” explains Zurberg.
The dogs can quickly search a unit in 15 minutes, whereas swabbing a unit for the pathogen would take 10 to 12 days.
“We are the only known operationalized program in North America,” she says. “We’ve covered the province of B.C. and we’ve done a few hospitals in the Ottawa area as well.”
The dogs work Monday to Friday, starting at about 7 a.m., and head home each night with their partner. They all take turns screening a unit and only one dog will work at a time.
During the pandemic, they even sought out COVID-19.
Angela Chapman, president and CEO of Vancouver General Hospital and the UBC Hospital Foundation, says the program is not only more effective than machine technologies, but it’s also providing revenues that are re-invested in research.
"This program is so important because really, there's no other logistically feasible way to find these reservoirs of contamination in the environment,” says Zurberg, noting she’s not sure what the future could hold for these sniffing pups.
“Really, we're limited by our imagination and that's it.”
