sjhoward.co.uk » NHS: Spreading infection to save 0.275p

NHS: Spreading infection to save 0.275p

135 words posted by Simon on 14 April 2007

Patricia Hewitt Have you ever stayed in a cheap hotel and thought that the sheets didn’t seem quite as fresh and clean as you might hope? Well, under the great leadership of Mad Pat, you might get the same feeling in hospital.

The Times reports today that cleaners at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham have been ordered to top-and-tail used sheets instead of using clean ones, to save 0.275p per sheet. Infection control clearly isn’t at the top of the agenda.

The NHS is crumbling. Florence Nightingale provided clean bedding for every patient over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Yet, in the 21st century, the NHS can’t afford it. Patients are being put at unacceptable risks to fund NHS managers and bureaucracy, yet news programmes are more interested in the love life of a 24 year old socialite.

This post was filed under: Health, Media, News and Comment.

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Comments and responses

Comment from Mort Karman

23.51, 15/04/2007

You and Mad Pat fight so much you ought to be married. Though I would hate to have a wife who used dirty sheets.
I would issue bumper stickers throughout the UK which read “Mad Pat is full of (dirty) sheet”
If she really needs the money she could sell the used white sheets to the Klu Klux Klan here.
Perhaps she could have the patients get up out of their intensive care beds and wash the sheets themselves.
But I still think my original idea is best. Mad Pat should make it a law that you can’t get sick in the U.K.
But what do you do if you are sick of Mad Pat?

Comment from Mort Karman

23.48, 16/04/2007

At latest count 33 people, human beings, are dead. shot to death by some crazy gunman we have not been told anything about except that he also killed himself.
Virginia Tech is a fine engineering university located in a peaceful area of rolling hills in the Virginia countryside.
It is the kind of campus parents like to send their children to because it is supposed to be located in a safe place.
Today that place was not safe.
In two individual, but apparently related incidents, what appears to be a lone gunman, armed with two assault rifles entered the open campus of the school and proceeded to murder people.
At a press briefing police and university officials offered little real information about what happened. They just gave the figures–33 dead including the shooter- and about 17 wounded or otherwise injured.
The university president and the local police chief sounded like the Keystone cops when they tried to explain why it took two hours to warn the students and faculty and why they did not lock down the entire campus.-Super Cop said they though shooter of first two people had hightailed it out of Dodge, so why bother to do any more.
I am sure there will be investigations up the yazoo and perhaps the university president and the police chief will get new jobs working as animal control officers, but that doesn’t bring back the dead people.
I don’t have answers.
We can’t turn our schools and universities into high security prisons with gates and a moat and machine gun toting guards. But we can’t keep loosing our young people and the folks who teach them.

Comment from sjhoward (author of the post)

07.17, 17/04/2007

That’s a brilliant comment. Can I steal it and post it on the top of the site – with due credit, of course?

Comment from Mort Karman

13.51, 17/04/2007

You don’t have to steal the Mad Pat comment. It is yours. I hope it does something to help. We make fun of her, but people are being hurt by what she does.

Comment from sjhoward (author of the post)

13.58, 17/04/2007

I meant your excellent reflection on the Virginia Tech shooting: “We can’t turn our schools and universities into high security prisons with gates and a moat and machine gun toting guards. But we can’t keep loosing our young people and the folks who teach them.” – too true.

Comment from Coire

18.19, 17/04/2007

Reminds me of when I was working in a leg ulcer clinic and they told us to cut down on the number of gloves we were using.. how exactly?…
I’ve no problem with top and tailing sheets or reusing them for the same patient instead of changing both sheets every day, but keeping them for more than one patient is just…well, MINGING!!

Comment from Mort Karman

19.06, 17/04/2007

You are welcome to use the shooting comment. By the way, as a reporter-photographer I was at Columbine during the incident and after it was over went inside the building to photograph the devastation for Belfor International, one of my clients, who did some of the cleanup. I think even as a medical student you would puke if you saw what was there. I am sure the scene at Virginia Tech is much the same.When I was in school the “bad” kids smoked tobacco behind the school or in the bathroom. And if we got caught, both our school authorities and parents punished us

Comment from sjhoward (author of the post)

21.58, 17/04/2007

Consider it pinched!

At my school, the worst the bad kids did was plant daffodils on the cricket ground – but then, perhaps that’s more of a reflection of the school than anything else!

Comment from Mort Karman

22.24, 17/04/2007

We have some updated information on the shooter. He was a loner and used the Glock 9mm semi auto pistol. That gun is standard issue for most police officers in the USA and the well to do gangster element. The poorer gang kids can’t get Glock guns unless they steal them as they cost from about $550 to over $1,000. Bullets extra.So i retract the earlier info about the assault rifles. He also had a 22 pistol as a backup, but the Glock is very reliable, so he did not need it. If you must go on a killing spree that is the gun to buy. My wife has a friend whose son goes to Virgina Tech. She told Dottie she sent him there because she did not want him to risk his life by joining the Army and going to Iraq. He was not involved in this tragedy, thank God.

Trackback from elsewhere on the site

22:13
26th April 2007.

This post has been referenced by another on this site:
sjhoward.co.uk » MTAS: Breaks spirits, breaks doctors, breaks the law

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