Nadine Dorries used to be a nurse, so David Cameron should sit 
up and listen when she offers him expert advice about cleaning hospital wards. She firmly believes uniforms should be laundered on site, that this would help wipe out infections. What she says makes good sense, and you can read it here.
It made me reflect on my recent personal experiences at the University College Hospital, London with my son David. This is what I observed.
I went to the loo where the seat was soaked with urine and the sanitary bin full and overflowing. I was washing my hands when a cleaner shuffled in, she looked left at the wall, then right. She did not look in the loos. She then turned around and shuffled outside where she had her cleaning trolley, then she shuffled along the corridor with it.
In the ward kitchen, shared by families of kids with cancer, there was an immense pile of dirty crockery. There wasn’t one clean mug and I wanted to make a drink, so I asked a nurse for some rubber gloves to get stuck in. She told me the cleaner would do it shortly. The cleaner arrived, handpicked which crockery to wash (separating anything used by a patient’s family). She left a pile of dirty mugs on the draining board and wiped around them. Suffice it to say that watching her cleaning techniques, I would not have wanted to use them.
My son’s bedside cubicle had a large sample of stale urine left in it when we arrived and he was supposed to place his personal belongings there. It smelt awful. The ward nurse was very cross about it and filed a report. He told me they had great difficulty in recruiting good cleaners.
Parents also described how they offered to move from their bedside seats to give cleaners easier access around the bed, but the cleaner ignored them and said it wasn’t necessary, so the area was not cleaned.
Regarding Nadine’s point on restricting hospital visitors, I saw a very large number of exotically dressed Eastern Europeans in the hospital lobby and my curiosity got the better of me, so I asked one of the woman where they came from. She said they were Polish Romany gypsies, that her mother had been admitted with heart problems. On one day,she told me there were 100 of them of all ages waiting to visit the sick women. There must have been 30 or 40 the day I saw them. She told me they had travelled from around the country, fearing the worst, but thankful to God that she had pulled through. I have no idea how many visited her bedside at any one time.
And why is it not mandatory for everyone to wash their hands with sterile cleaning fluids when they enter a ward? This was mandatory on our cruise last summer whenever we re-entered the ship from a shore visit and ate in the restaurants. The staff were fanatical about it, they were always hovering around with their dispensers.
A main difficulty seems to be in finding dedicated cleaning staff who will do the job properly, their managers should not allow them to get away with shoddy work.
