I DO HOPE that all you hospital cleaners out there are paying attention to Michael Howard. He has a cunning plan which will make hospital wards sparkling clean again. If you vote for him he will bring back “Super Matron”, a redoubtable Hattie Jacques figure with the power to close down wards which she deems too dirty. Then we will have no more MRSA and everyone will live happily ever after.
What’s that? Not cynicism, I hope. What do you mean that reinstating matron is not the perfect solution to the MRSA crisis? That sounds like an attitude problem. Perhaps matron needs to crack the whip, then you might knuckle down and do your job more thoroughly.
Mr Howard’s hospital rescue plan does not, admittedly, insult the intelligence as much as Tony Blair did when asked to comment recently on dirty hospitals. He breezily replied: “There are good and bad cleaners.” But it does spectacularly miss the point.
The reason why hospitals are filthy is simple: they are cleaned by overworked staff on minimum wages using poor equipment who answer to private contract companies which are squeezing their budgets ever tighter as they race to offer the lowest tender.
The hospital cleaner’s job is nasty, thankless, miserable and his reward at the end of a backbreaking day is about £40. I know because I was one. For a week, anyway. In 2001, I worked undercover as a cleaner at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. I was one of about five white staff. The rest were black or Asian. We were paid £4.12 an hour.
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When you are paddling in someone else’s blood-flecked urine and handling diarrhoea-stained sheets you thank God that in the real world other people do these kind of jobs and not you. Most of us do not realise that cleaners do not just clean. They serve patients their meals and ensure that they have constant fresh drinking water. They organise the disposal of clinical waste. They are our first line of defence against MRSA — proper frontline workers — yet they are paid and treated like disposable workhorses.
Where I worked, cleaners lost 15 minutes’ pay if they were more than five minutes late. Many had housing problems but could not afford the time off to deal with them. They were allowed 30 minutes for lunch, unpaid. In our working area there were no seats so staff who spent all day on their feet took their 15-minute break crouched on their haunches or perched on plastic dustbins. When they washed the dishes the cleaning company rationed the amount of detergent used. Staff turnover and sickness — surprise, surprise — is high. The vacancy rate in London is 30 per cent. Over the past 20 years the number of NHS cleaners has fallen by some 40,000 during which time MRSA cases have soared.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair and Mr Howard try to trump each other on who will clamp down harder on immigrants when it is becoming increasingly clear that immigrants will soon be the only people left willing to take on these backbreaking jobs. This week Tesco revealed that it was recruiting Polish workers to fill posts which British people refuse to consider.
Mr Howard and Mr Blair have talked about withholding payments to hospital cleaning companies if the job is not done properly. Why do they not tackle the real issue — why is such a vitally important job as NHS cleaning contracted out at all?
Lawbreakers
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SO, THE HUNTING ban is law and the chances of its being enforced look about as high as John Prescott’s hopes of winning Rear of the Year.
Thousands have promised to defy the ban. I realise this legislation is a nightmare to police but it is difficult to remember a time when avowed lawbreakers have enjoyed such sympathy from our authorities. The Association of Chief Police Officers says that those who defy it will not get a criminal record. The Government agrees that prosecutions should be a low priority for police. A pro-hunt magistrate has resigned his position because he refuses to sit in judgment on his friends who break the new law.
This week the chairman of the Essex Police Federation, a hunt sympathiser, said that if her friends went out drag hunting and happened to kill a real fox she would not report them. (Essex, incidentally, is the county where you are more likely to get a speeding ticket than anywhere else in England. I wonder if Essex police would be willing to turn a similar blind eye to some of the 200,000-plus fixed penalties it dishes out each year?)
Maybe my memory is playing tricks but I do not recall the same sympathy being afforded to striking miners in the 1980s who, after all, were just folk trying to protect jobs and a traditional way of life. I seem to remember the authorities rather relishing enforcing the law on that occasion. But then rural police officers and magistrates probably did not hobnob with miners quite as much as they do with members of the local hunt.
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Vulgar copy
SOME HAVE denounced Asda’s £19 copy of Camilla Parker Bowles’s engagement ring as vulgar and tacky. Does that mean that they think the real one sitting on her finger is not?