According to an article in Time magazine nearly twenty per cent of people admitted to US hospitals acquire an infection while they are there and most of these infections are transmitted from one patient to another by doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. These infections cause nearly 90,000 deaths a year and cost about $4.5 billion to treat. Lack of hand-washing by medical staff is a major cause of this calamity claimed the prestigious publication.
Now when I was a kid in the primers at Lansdowne School there was a sign above the blackboard that said: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” This piece of advice was invariably pointed out to us by our rather stern teacher, an elderly spinster named Miss McKenzie, whenever we used the toilet or got muddied hands or knees from pursuits in the playground. I assume there will be similar information offered today’s tiny tots, though in this agnostic-tending society, no doubt Godliness will have been replaced with something more temporal.
Some years ago I spent a night in a well-regarded Wellington hospital after minor surgery. A couple of weeks after my internment I had a phone call from a pleasant lady from the infirmary who wanted to know how I had enjoyed my visit. I wanted to tell her that I would rather have been in my own bed in the far reaches of the region but being the essence of politeness and good manners I allowed that I had enjoyed myself immensely.
Obviously this wasn’t true. There was, for instance, the embarrassing occasion when an attractive nurse took to an unmentionable part of my anatomy with a razor and casually chatted away as though this was a normal everyday occurrence; which it may well have been for her. But I assured my caller that the service was excellent, the nurses almost too attentive and that on a scale of one to ten, Solway Park being a ten, the hospital registered a 9.5.
Well, they say that God took the rib of Adam and fashioned it into the world’s greatest lie detector, whatever, the lady on the phone did not believe my story and reckoned she perceived a degree of hesitancy in my voice. I restated my satisfaction, but my heart wasn’t in it and so I eventually conceded that there were some problems; in the area of cleanliness.
You see my wife and my daughter spent a good deal of the time at my bedside and after conversation ran out they turned their attention to the state of my room, which I was paying about four times the Solway Park rate for. They ascertained that within the four walls there was dust and dirt aplenty and they naturally felt that it was their bounden duty to point this out to me.
I was eternally grateful for the information of course. They reckon that the airlines recognise the importance of having the passenger section of the aircraft spotlessly clean so their customers will assume that the same attention to detail has occurred up in the cockpit where the plane is controlled, reducing nervousness about flying to a bare minimum.
And so just minutes before I was to be wheeled in my bed down the interminably long corridor for surgery I had now found out that my room was a host to dirt and presumably attendant bacteria. I therefore reasoned that it was entirely possible the operating theatre would be full of rodents and I subsequently agonised over whether the surgeon had been taught in the primers to wash his hands after going to the toilet.
Inevitably then, I confessed to the phone surveyor that there were some downsides to the visit.
I’m going to digress slightly here. There’s a surprising story, quite possibly an urban myth, which has been doing the rounds for some time about an intensive care unit in a large American hospital where patients always died in the same bed, on a Sunday morning, at about 11:00 a.m. regardless of their medical condition.
This puzzled doctors and some even thought it might have had something to do with the supernatural. No one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths occurred around 11:00 a. m. on Sunday so a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents.
The following Sunday morning, a few minutes before 11:00 a.m. all of the doctors and nurses waited nervously outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off the evil spirits.
Just when the clock struck eleven, Pookie Johnson, the part time Sunday sweeper, entered the ward and unplugged the life support system, so he could use the vacuum cleaner.
Actually I didn’t digress that far. At least old Pookie Johnson had been employed to sweep the hospital which indicates that they recognised that cleanliness was important.
Time headlined their story: “Wash Those Hands!” in their claim that healthcare workers were making their patients sick by not paying enough attention to personal hygiene.
I find it rather strange that 160 years after Florence Nightingale revolutionised nursing by recognising the importance of hospital sanitation and eons since I was told in the primers that cleanliness was next to
Godliness that the civilised world has to be taught the same logical lessons all over again.
“Physicians of all men are most happy; what good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth, and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.”
Now when I was a kid in the primers at Lansdowne School there was a sign above the blackboard that said: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” This piece of advice was invariably pointed out to us by our rather stern teacher, an elderly spinster named Miss McKenzie, whenever we used the toilet or got muddied hands or knees from pursuits in the playground. I assume there will be similar information offered today’s tiny tots, though in this agnostic-tending society, no doubt Godliness will have been replaced with something more temporal.
Some years ago I spent a night in a well-regarded Wellington hospital after minor surgery. A couple of weeks after my internment I had a phone call from a pleasant lady from the infirmary who wanted to know how I had enjoyed my visit. I wanted to tell her that I would rather have been in my own bed in the far reaches of the region but being the essence of politeness and good manners I allowed that I had enjoyed myself immensely.
Obviously this wasn’t true. There was, for instance, the embarrassing occasion when an attractive nurse took to an unmentionable part of my anatomy with a razor and casually chatted away as though this was a normal everyday occurrence; which it may well have been for her. But I assured my caller that the service was excellent, the nurses almost too attentive and that on a scale of one to ten, Solway Park being a ten, the hospital registered a 9.5.
Well, they say that God took the rib of Adam and fashioned it into the world’s greatest lie detector, whatever, the lady on the phone did not believe my story and reckoned she perceived a degree of hesitancy in my voice. I restated my satisfaction, but my heart wasn’t in it and so I eventually conceded that there were some problems; in the area of cleanliness.
You see my wife and my daughter spent a good deal of the time at my bedside and after conversation ran out they turned their attention to the state of my room, which I was paying about four times the Solway Park rate for. They ascertained that within the four walls there was dust and dirt aplenty and they naturally felt that it was their bounden duty to point this out to me.
I was eternally grateful for the information of course. They reckon that the airlines recognise the importance of having the passenger section of the aircraft spotlessly clean so their customers will assume that the same attention to detail has occurred up in the cockpit where the plane is controlled, reducing nervousness about flying to a bare minimum.
And so just minutes before I was to be wheeled in my bed down the interminably long corridor for surgery I had now found out that my room was a host to dirt and presumably attendant bacteria. I therefore reasoned that it was entirely possible the operating theatre would be full of rodents and I subsequently agonised over whether the surgeon had been taught in the primers to wash his hands after going to the toilet.
Inevitably then, I confessed to the phone surveyor that there were some downsides to the visit.
I’m going to digress slightly here. There’s a surprising story, quite possibly an urban myth, which has been doing the rounds for some time about an intensive care unit in a large American hospital where patients always died in the same bed, on a Sunday morning, at about 11:00 a.m. regardless of their medical condition.
This puzzled doctors and some even thought it might have had something to do with the supernatural. No one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths occurred around 11:00 a. m. on Sunday so a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents.
The following Sunday morning, a few minutes before 11:00 a.m. all of the doctors and nurses waited nervously outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off the evil spirits.
Just when the clock struck eleven, Pookie Johnson, the part time Sunday sweeper, entered the ward and unplugged the life support system, so he could use the vacuum cleaner.
Actually I didn’t digress that far. At least old Pookie Johnson had been employed to sweep the hospital which indicates that they recognised that cleanliness was important.
Time headlined their story: “Wash Those Hands!” in their claim that healthcare workers were making their patients sick by not paying enough attention to personal hygiene.
I find it rather strange that 160 years after Florence Nightingale revolutionised nursing by recognising the importance of hospital sanitation and eons since I was told in the primers that cleanliness was next to
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