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.
