EVERY time there is a major investigation involving officialdom, the same old cliché is trotted out for our benefit. We are told lessons will be learned. I have long suspected this line is nothing but a sop to the masses to reassure us everything is going to be OK when it isn’t.
The fact is the last thing anybody wants to learn is a lesson – because lessons cost money.
Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (ARI) provides a classic example of this.
The hospital is at the centre of a controversial report which horrified everyone who read it.
The new Healthcare Environment Inspectorate was set up to fight the spread of infections such as clostridium difficile in Scottish hospitals.
It makes announced and unannounced visits to hospitals at least once every three years.
The report revealed a catalogue of neglect, branding conditions at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary as “very poor”.
There were numerous examples throughout the hospital of consistently poor cleaning. It said that “no consideration” had been given to the risk posed to patients. To make matters worse, it is not that long since the husband of one patient highlighted his concerns by insisting on cleaning around his wife’s bed himself.
Ian Selbie, from Lerwick, was so worried when his wife, Eileen, had to have an operation at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary that he followed her around throughout her stay with high-powered cleaning equipment to make sure she didn’t catch anything.
Mr Selbie believed his wife was at risk of contracting the MRSA bug during her stay. He set about cleaning Eileen’s ward and bringing her food from outside the hospital.
No relative of the sick should ever be driven to such a course of action.
It is bad enough when someone you love needs an operation, never mind not being able to trust the authorities to keep the wards clean.
This is not just a problem for ARI. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, is the most common type of hospital-acquired infection in the UK. It is a type of bacterium often found on the skin and/or in the noses of healthy people. Although it is usually harmless in these places, it may occasionally get into other parts of the body, through breaks in the skin such as cuts or wounds and cause infections.
These may be mild or serious. Those who do not die can still suffer dreadful injuries and illnesses.
MRSA is a bug which attacks anyone whose immune system is depleted. It therefore attacks vulnerable people. As such, it is highly infectious and runs rife in hospitals up and down the country.
The superbug can spread between patients, usually by physical contact. For example, it will eat away at a wound until finally it succeeds in destroying the whole body. Just what you need when you are poorly already.
So many hospitals these days are filthy. The floors are unwashed, the windows always tightly closed, toilets cleaned half-heartedly by domestics who then hand out lunch to patients. It is enough to make your blood run cold.
Let me ask you a simple question: if you had a desperately-ill and highly-contagious person in your house, would you leave them to lie in unchanged sheets, in an unclean room? Would you sack your cleaner and laundry staff and make a decision to muddle through the best you could?
No, you would not. You would spend whatever it took; do everything in your power to help the person get better.
In the good old days of the Hattie Jacques-style matron 20 years ago, if you went into hospital, there were usually two domestics per ward. Now, you would be lucky to find one and she will be covering several areas. Employed by a private contractor, they are and always have been poorly paid and treated abysmally.
Things are so bad that anyone who goes into hospital these days is likely to catch a nasty bug and some may not come out again. This is no exaggeration.
Hospital-acquired infections kill 5,000 patients annually and cost the health service £1billion every year. The treatment of such infections was revolutionised in the 1940s by the introduction of the antibiotic penicillin. Unfortunately, most strains of staphylococcus aureus are now resistant to penicillin; one reason why it is known as the superbug.
A third of us carry MRSA, but most people never become ill except when in hospital, which is the bug’s principal breeding ground.
There is something particularly unsavoury about the fact that hospitals breed this bug. These bastions of care are killing patients, even babies, instead of curing them. We all know that infection is spread mainly by people not washing their hands. You don’t need to be a qualified doctor to know that disinfectant kills germs; that hygiene is essential when infection is present, and that sick people have little chance of recovering in an atmosphere of dirt and decay.
If you keep reducing cleaning staff, you cannot expect the same quality of service. As standards drop, patient care is swept under the same carpet as the muck nobody seems to want to pick up.
It is about time Scotland’s hospitals had a great deal more onsite infection control – people, spies, basically, who could leak information to the main inspectorate about standards of hygiene in any hospital. If the inspectorate finds filthy conditions, then health trusts should have to set out a plan for rectifying the specific problems within a set time.
Failure to comply must have serious consequences.
For example, not complying could result in Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon imposing special measures on a trust and personally overseeing an improvement programme. Otherwise, dirty hospitals will stay dirty and patients will continue to die.
Vastly overpaid hospital chiefs have to stand up and be counted. To date, no one at ARI or the trust which runs it has seen fit to fall in shame on his or her sword.
More’s the pity.