Wards

October 4th, 2004

The front page of the News of the World the other day (I’m not sure what day - it wasn’t my paper, I just kinda picked it up out of a pile) had a big feature on MRSA in Glasgow Royal hospital. Frankly it was pretty scary stuff. An undercover journalist who spent a few weeks there working as a cleaner found traces of the bug just about everywhere, even on the mops she was using which should really only have contained disinfectant. It was mostly due to the lack of care of staff who knew what they should have been doing, but didn’t really bother.

My missus had a long stay in hospital lately and it’s terrifying to say that everything in the story’s exposé struck a chord.

She was in the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley, on the outskirts of Glasgow where the standards of hygene were, in a word, low.

A patient vomited in the shared toilet in the morning and it wasn’t cleaned up until late in the afternoon. Spillages on the floor of the ward were not cleaned up for days.

A cleaner came into my wife’s room and used one damp cloth to wipe the sink, the toilet and her table that she eats from, and in that order. And I mean just wipe. My wife ended up cleaning things herself using cleaning materials brought in for her by her sister.

If the bin was emptied it was a good day.

My wife entered the ward at the same time as a student nurse who was having her first day there. She told about how she’d asked what she could be doing, being all keen as you would be on your first day.

“Just chill” she was told. And they all did.

It’s a very unpopular viewpoint to say that hospital staff are lazy. They are known as people who have some of the hardest work, and who get paid some of the lowest wages. Hospital staff are also only human, and when human beings get paid shit wages to do shit jobs, they tend not to care very much about the job. This is a bit of a disaster in a profession where caring is what you’re meant to do.

I can honestly say that the nurses on my wife’s ward were some of the most obviously unmotivated staff I’ve seen. I can also honestly say that the toilets in McDonalds were much more carefully maintained and cleaned, and probably a hundred times more safe to use.

I could tell you more, but seriously - you don’t want to know it.

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