The Bitch: Maggots, Cockroaches, Rats and Pickles!

Well Darlings,

People who are ill, or who may have suffered an accident and had to be hospitalised for a while, will often be full of praises for the Health Service and the treatment they receive. It is quite natural to be grateful to anyone who helps us when we need it, so thankfully the majority we meet in the NHS at treatment level are still the caring, hardworking and conscientious people they always have been. But whilst gratefully accepting this, we must never allow it to cloud our overall view of the NHS. Compared to yesteryear there is definitely a whole lot wrong with it today, and most of what is wrong has very little to do with those we are happy to meet at our point of treatment.

It was on the popular radio show of the forties, "Have A Go!", that Wilfred Pickles coined the catchphrase: "Have you ever had an embarrassing moment?" Another one was, after the contestants had answered a question satisfactorily, when he would tell his wife to: "Give 'em the money, Mabel!"

We certainly don't need Wilfred Pickles to ask the question for us today. It is plain for all to see the NHS is having an embarrassing moment or two right now. In a pickle with almost 20,000 incidents of pest infestation in its hospitals over the past two years has got to be an enormous embarrassment for the NHS. Nevertheless health bosses have tried to defend the Trusts by claiming the fact that seven out of ten of them have called in pest control officers more than fifty times since January 2006 is proof enough they were tackling the problem.

Well, it is undoubtedly that, but such a stupid statement reveals nothing at all about why there is a problem in the first place - and such a pronounced problem. The Great Western Hospital in Swindon, a new state of the art hospital, had to call in pest controllers nine times in an eight-week period earlier this year. That makes me suspect some people have not been having a go when they should have done here - so no, in this case I would say do not give them the money, Mabel!

Ants, I think everyone can easily forgive. We will all have been plagued by ants at sometime or another in our lives. But when we hear that two-thirds of the NHS Trusts have reported problems with rats, and more than three-quarters with mice, then the sensible brain does start to fire a few questions, doesn't it? And being told that cockroaches have been reported at 59% of Trusts, fleas or other biting insects at 65%, bed bugs at 24%, with maggots even being found in patients' slippers, I find does little to quench its thirst for a rational explanation.

The television news story some of us were subjected to on the day before these statistics were released under the Freedom of Information Act, where maggots were shown to be used for cleaning wounds in a hospital, and we were told research would soon be underway into seeing whether the humble cockroach possessed similar healing qualities, was quite a coincidence, wasn't it? Do you believe in coincidences? I do, but I spell it differently.

We need to remember these are the Health Authorities in the spotlight here. Organisations made up of the very people responsible for the many stringent hygiene rules and regulations the rest of us have to adhere to, or suffer the consequences. Quickly leaping to their defence the government has dismissed any suggestion these infestation problems being suffered were linked to the spread of hospital infections, insisting there was only a "negligible" threat to patient safety.

Hmm . . . Like they would know! Do our politicians come with full-blown medical degrees these days? No, I'm betting they are simply taking the word of the already found wanting NHS Trusts. It is a preposterous statement!

If it really is true that the threat to those already ill patients in these hospitals was negligible, then I have to wonder why it is so essential for everyone else to run such meticulously clean and infestation-free premises when dealing with healthy people. If it is perfectly okay to simply dismiss the problem when it is the NHS that has it, then why is it not equally as okay to dismiss it for (say) any hotel, shop or restaurant suffering similarly? I don't recall ever hearing of any government minister leaping to defend one of them in their hour of trouble by saying the risk was negligible so it really didn't matter that much. Of course it matters!

Thankfully all the hotels, shops and restaurants I know, and that is quite a few here in Blackpool, seem to have a far better hygiene record than many of our NHS hospitals! Perhaps that is because mostly they ignore many of the stupid rules and regulations, and the mountains of paperwork they are supposed to fill in religiously every time they wipe this or check that; mountains of it threatening to destroy the planet. Instead of wasting time that is precious to them, they just get on with doing the job properly. Given the choice between five minutes form-filling and an extra five minutes cleaning, I know which one I would prefer.

For many in the hospitality trade their expertise far exceeds that of any inspectorate who has learned parrot-fashion a "one-size-fits-all" routine, and those silly forms get attended to in their free time, filled in with a enough codswallop to satisfy the Public Protection Officers who will probably have received their training to the local Health Authority Standards anyway. Standards, as can be seen, clearly producing results inferior to those of most large businesses. Need I say anything more?

No, I need not - but I will. I have yet to find one job where petty rules and useless form-filling has improved anything. But I have found many, and we will all know of many, where such pathetic routines have made matters remarkably worse - take the police as a prime example. Filling in a form to say a task has been carried out may provide employment for a few officials, but simply writing something down on a piece of paper is no proof the job has been done properly, or even actually done at all.