Dirty old place called Hospital

MRSA. That stands for drug resistant bacteria, the type that keeps on killing people again and again in our hospitals. Governments in all the industrialised world are spending countless millions trying to combat this problem, but are not having much success. Why are they having no luck? Let me tell you the story of ward thirteen, the 35 bed surgical ward I've spent the last few weeks in.

There's vomit on the floor. It's not unusual, it does happen. I'm used to cleaning up the occasional bit of vomit, but the cleaner is here with me. She just happened to be in the room when I noticed it. "Can you please clean it up?" I asked the woman. She shook her head "It's against the rules" she answered.

It seems rather strange to me, a cleaner with a mop, not cleaning up the vomit on the floor. I asked the silly question of "Why not?" "It's a body product, and we aren't allowed to touch that. We don't have the training." I don't actually have any training either, I must have missed the lesson in nursing school about how to clean up vomit, but I have to do something.

I asked her to give me her mop. "It's against the rules" she replied again, to which I asked again, "Why?" "You're not trained to use my equipment. If you injure yourself or anyone else I could lose my job." As yet I've never managed to harm anyone with a mop, although I was beginning to have some serious thoughts of how it could actually be done.

Next step is to go to the cleaning cupboard and get a mop and soap-like stuff. I should have guessed, the cupboard is locked. "You can't go in there" I was beginning to think the cleaning lady was stalking me. As it turns out the ward doesn't own any cleaning equipment. The equipment belongs to the cleaning company that is hired to clean our hospital. The cleaning company is terrified of being sued, so strictly enforces rules about body products and use of it's tools.

The result is that I clean up shit and all sorts of stuff with a towel which is pushed around by the sole of my shoe. Sometimes I put on gloves and get down on my hands and knees to clean crap up. It's impossible to keep my uniform clean, so I take it home and try to get it cleaned and dried for the next day as my other uniform is still in the washing machine, soaking wet. I never like taking my uniform home as I'm not really keen on spreading hospital germs to my wife and children, but hospitals no longer do staff laundry as it saves them quite a bit of money. In fact it's another outside agency that now does the laundry, so I guess they really need to save some money somehow. It would be so much easier if things were done the old way, with the hospital taking care of its own business, taking pride in doing a job properly, because none of the outside service people that I've seen seem to give a damn.

I wonder what new plans the government will come up with to combat hospital infection???