I've posted on this subject before, but Mousie got me thinking with his post on an encounter with a prune-faced bean counter named 'Olive.'
I have the bright-eyed, idealistic thought that hospitals should be clean. I know, I know, how naive right? I mean we are taught from day one during our training how important cleanliness is, how to put on sterile gloves and apply sterile dressings lest some stray microbe contaminate our patients surgical wound. Don't shake the linens as you will rustle microbes up into the air, brush your ventilated patients teeth every shift to prevent ventilator acquired pneumonia, wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands.
so with all the emphasis on cleanliness is next to Godliness, why is it that there is so little concern about the fact that our hospitals are FILTHY? Sure the halls are waxed and gleaming to trick the eye but when you pull out a gurney there is dirt and dust bunnies behind it, the ceiling vents are furry with dust, the windows are unwashed, the patient rooms are not wiped down and mopped daily and when is the last time you have seen a patient curtain changed?
What good does it do for me to wash my hands until they bleed when the patients room is a petri dish for every known organism? Think I'm over-exaggerating? Take the Wood's lamp into a room and turn off the light, it will light up like a crime scene.
Why aren't administrators more concerned with cleanliness? Saving money of course. After all, paying another cleaner or two minimum wage may mean the difference between bankruptcy and financial solvency. And the cleaners they do have don't all come equipped with a work ethic. After all, if you are cleaning up shit for minimum wage with no benefits, where is your incentive to bust your ass?
So when you and your loved one has to go to the hospital, ask them how many house cleaners there are per shift on the unit and how frequently the rooms are cleaned. Ask to have a new cubicle curtain hung. Watch them clean and make sure they wipe your over bed table, all the surfaces and around the light switch. It is just as important as making sure your caregivers wash their hands.
8 comments:
I prefer to not think about what a hospital room would look under a Woods lamp. I prefer to not think about what some of my doctors or nurses hands look like under the woods lamp. I learned how to wash my hands from a good nurse, and I'm afraid when other people don't do it right.
Washing your hands even when the room is covered in filth just makes you feel better. I work in a restaurant and wash mine more than anyone I've ever seen.
eewww The curtain one is a good idea. I can't stand when the curtains touch me while I am in a room. I have never seen them clean them. Of course I don't stalk the hospital curtains either, but come on-they have got to be the nastiest part of a hospital.
The public hospital here has patient bathrooms that are worse than any bar bathroom I've ever been in. Truly scary. The tile grout was white several decades ago, and there is more rust than a hospital in a third world country.
I have been in a few of those scary dirty hospitals, especially when I did travel nursing. The hospital I work in now is actually VERY clean. Patient rooms get a 'terminal cleaning' (sounds so bad) when the patient is discharged. This is a ceiling to floor cleaning, the bed is cleaned top to bottom, mattress top and bottom, etc. The curtains in the ER are changed every month and PRN (I have called myself to have curtains changed from splattered blood/vomit/charcoal) and the housekeeping dept sends someone down to change it. I'm really lucky to work in such a clean hospital I think.
Yeah! And, ask the attending Doctor when was the last time he changed his tie. According to an article in NY Times last year, some infections are spread through the doctor leaning over a patient and then going to the next patient and doing the same thing.
Meh.
I actually asked the Director why we have CARPETS in patient rooms!
Can you imagine that? Carpets! He looked at me like I was speaking Martian.
This, along with the ridiculously stupid policy of cramming patients with MRSA (and other nasty resistant cooties) on the same floor as patients with Hip and Knee replacements....
I tell you, sometimes I just shake my head in wonder.
WE had a brand NEW E/R dept barely 3yrs now. It is FILTHY. When the NEW dept. opened that short time ago, there was a dedicated housekeeper to the E/R. She was VERy efficient & cleaned insanely. After the Grand Opening hoopla died down our Hispanic awesome house keeper was switched to another dept. ......politics....the housekeeper now spends more time visiting E/R clerks, hovering over sensitive information sites, out smoking & goldbricking in the E/R lounge enjoying the E/R stafffs food & drink......there are puddles & splatters that haven't been touched w/ a cleaning device for now counting over 3 weeks. The housekeeper now wants nursing to take care of emptying the garbages/haz wastes/sharps as "is too busy"...........I'm waiting for the velcro belted mop to be issued as standard nursing equipment next for oour backsides, that way nursing can be mopping the floors while we're up & down & in & out of the rooms...........
And I was looked at like I was psychotic when I questioned why my 7-year-old was wearing a gown that had blood splatter on it.
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