The debate surrounding the NHS superbug crisis infecting Gordon Brown’s young premiership has too become riddled with a virus of party political manoeuvrings. All the while the root issue remains unchecked.
This weeks report by the government’s health watchdog revealed that scores of NHS patients have been killed by Britain’s deadliest superbug, c-difficile. This, alongside the continued spread of MRSA has prompted Alistair Darling to announce a £270million investment to combat hospital-acquired infections.
Despite Gordon Brown championing his ‘deep clean’ of NHS hospitals, the actual issue of cleaners remains entirely anonymous. Instead the rumblings over Labour targets, and Tory under investment continue.
Cleanliness is a vital factor in tackling hospital superbugs and is an essential component of good nursing. As the Daily Mail was in pains to note “In her seminal Notes On Nursing, published in 1860, Florence Nightingale wrote that the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness”. Sadly, thanks to a Thatcher introduced privatisation policy, continued under Labour, nurses play little role in cleaning hospitals anymore, and hospital managers have no direct control over what is cleaned and when in NHS hospitals.
The NHS was once the bastion of Labour values and yet they have allowed the policy of outsourced firms running hospital cleanliness to remain. The rationale was that private companies could provide a more cost effective way of ensuring clean hospitals. Yet studies show that whilst private companies can indeed save costs – by hammering down on wages, they retain the mark-up and walk away with the profits. As a result, workers who are the lowest paid, often unregistered and with little English manage an essential part of patient safety. The average wage of a contracted cleaner hovers around £4.20/hour. This grossly represents the disregard with which both the main political parties have for such a fundamental part of patient care.
Whilst some bemoaned ‘modern-day feminism’ as the cause of nurses indifference to ensuring cleanliness, and the Conservative’s harped on about Labour’s top-down, centralised targets, critics and the government have failed to touch upon the loss of control and accountability that the outsourced cleaner system entails. Compared to the early 1980s there are now less then half the number cleaners, who are lower paid and contracted to a external third-party, have no relationship with nurses and hospital staff. It is an absurd situation where if a hospital manager finds a dirty ward, she cannot call upon a cleaner to sort it out, she would have to contact an entirely separate management system.
The dominant parties have failed to recognise this inadequacy and much of the media debate has been poisoned with the same impotence. It is not just our hospitals that require a deep clean but our media analysis, which needs to root out the dirt of dogmatic ideology that prevents reasoned debate.
The great thing about the party conference season and possibly the only source of interest is that you get a feel for a party’s true colours. The MPs pile out the same old media-inspired drivel you get all year but the party members, with their unkept beards and ill-fitting sweaters have little time for image, they instead betray the true essence of the party and its supporters.
The Tory hearts today poured out over the state of Britain’s public services and from all corners of (middle) England there were outcries over our shocking ’socialist’, ‘centralist’ and ‘Stalinist’ government. This would have sent economic students wild, scurrying around and dusting down their Keynesian textbooks. They would all have been thoroughly perplexed, because despite the cries of the opposition members and the calls from government itself, Britain’s public services are barley within touching distance of the state any more.
The NHS, the sentimental and ideological heart of the social-democratic movement, has had billions of taxpayers’ pounds thrown at it. Yet little of this money has been directed at strengthening public healthcare. Instead subcontractors, PFI schemes and private firms have seized upon and weakened the public’s grip on its health service. Under the guise of the Public Finance Initiative, private companies use taxpayers money to build, run and manage many NHS projects. This flagship, ‘modernising’ policy of New Labour was meant to introduce market style competition into health care. The debates about any supposed benefits of competition are completely misplaced here because private subcontractors are given fixed, lengthy deals lasting up to thirty years.
Rather then fret, the Tory heartland could have eased their ailments about a socialist state by hearing that New Labour plans a £64bln sell off of NHS management to multinational firms. In the name of ‘competitiveness’ New Labour worked with massive US healthcare corporations such as Kaiser Permanente and began the process of restructuring the NHS along privatised, American lines. Their market ’solutions’ include paying private firms vast sums of money to run Human Resource departments for the NHS. Whilst you’d have thought that the key human resource – patient care would get investment priority, downsizing and cutbacks will instead see PFI firms collect a handsome £23bln profit over the next thirty years.
This new brand of socialism would make Thatcher proud, not even she had the gall to sell off the NHS and now New Labour is doing it for her. Perhaps the Daily Mail may boast ‘we’re all Socialists now.’
