Two mothers have recently died from an infection acquired at a Winchester hospital, within 72 hours of each other.
Both women, Amy Kimmance and Jasmine Pickett, died from complications linked to Streptococcus A, normally relating to sore throats. The infection has been linked to a breakdown in infection control, something denied by the Royal Hampshire Hospital which had missed its target for reducing MRSA last year and had 191 reported cases of clostridium difficile.
This is the second time that this hospital has attracted negative publicity having recently featured in the Meanest Hospital Award for food hygiene standards.
As the Voice of the Cleaning Industry, the BCC has spoken out about this ongoing problem in many UK hospitals and the gravity of not getting the cleaning mix right. The root cause comes from a lack of appropriate funding for cleaning staff, inadequate training of those staff, poor provision of cleansing equipment and lack of uniformity of successful cleaning procedures from one establishment to the next.
Unnecessary flack is often taken by cleaners who are often overlooked, undervalued and underpaid. The BCC has welcomed the Government`s proposals for deep cleaning of all hospitals but more clarity is needed on what exactly is involved. Importantly, budgets need to be overhauled and increased permanently to support the demands of good hospital cleaning provision.
The deep clean move has come under fire by the Conservative Party as the Government plans to monitor developments on a local level. There is current confusion over numbers of hospitals to have carried out the deep clean as the Health Secretary Alan Johnson claims that 50 of these have happened so far, the DoH now claims that this is 50 NHS trusts and not hospitals.
While a one-off deep clean is a step in the right direction, it is not going to fix the problem of Healthcare Associated Infections so a longer term solution, a blueprint on hospital cleaning needs to come into play.
There is one certainty in this complex scenario, many hospitals are crying out for radicalisation of cleaning and hygiene standards. Success needs to be replicated from the hospitals that manage to keep high risk of infection at bay through spotless wards. The BCC is happy to work closely in an advisory capacity with the Department of Health to help them eradicate this problem once and for all.
In the past BCC has called for new ways of looking at and dealing with the problem, including most recently a call on hospital managers to seek the advice and support of the cleaning industry to turn the problem around. A back to basics approach may be the only way to get all hospitals back restored to their former matron run glory and redeem the reputation of hospital cleanliness.
