Our Health Secretary will apparently say, “Today I am setting out how we will equip the new regulator with tougher powers, backed by fines, to inspect, investigate and intervene where hospitals are failing to meet hygiene standards.” So, apparently, this is going to help crack down on MRSA, but who I wonder is going to be fined? Is it going to be the Nigerian illegal immigrant mopping all the floors and wiping down all surfaces with the same bucket of dirty water? Is it going to be the doctor who failed to wash his hands after taking a dump? Or the nurse whose education now tells her more about how she should treat the Nigerian cleaner than about hygiene? Is it going to be the wanker politicians who so overloaded the NHS with red tape, targets and useless bureacrats to deal with all this that there’s not enough money for a bottle of Domestos? Is it going to be the waste-of-space hospital managers who sit quivering in their offices? No, of course it isn’t. The dirty hospital will be fined, the guilty parties will continue trousering their inflated salaries, more red tape will be generated, the doctors and nurses will be wasting their time filling in paperwork, and stumbling over a new strata of ideologically correct bureaucrats incapable of dealing with the real problems and, because the hospital budget has been reduced, patient services will be trimmed down, hurried, cut. And where will the money from the fine go? To another hospital? Well maybe a small portion of it, after most of it has been hoovered up by the twats administering it all. End result: microscopic change in services, huge amounts of money wasted.
So what's new?
So why is this happening now? Why have the cleaning standards of private firms not been audited before, why has it not been possible to fine/cancel contracts before?
Who set up this shambles and why are then not being made to clean the corners of a colorectal ward with their tongue?
I was discussing the rail network with a friend the other day and he came up with a way to encourage better working practice.
Refund the percentage of the ticket price based on how late the train is. So, if the normal journey is 30 min and the train is 15 min late, refund 50% of the ticket price. Train 30 min late, refund 100% of the ticket price.
Importantly the money from this comes out of the staff wages, so a lazy worker causes late trains causes less wages.
The same system would work for the NHS, dirty hospital gets fined, money from that fine comes from the wages. A administrator is less likely to skimp on cleaning budget if it hits his pockets and a cleaner will make more effort if his wages are affected.
I agree that temp contract cleaners are a bad idea as they have very little reason to do a good job, but writing things like "Nigerian illegal immigrant" doesn't really add to the argument.