National Health is Filthy & Infested

Filthy NHS wards are being plagued by pests - with maggots found in slippers and rats in maternity units, reports the Daily Mail
Hospitals are so dirty that pest controllers were called out to 20,000 infestations in the past two years.

Experts warned that the appalling levels of hygiene added to the danger to patients from the deadly superbugs MRSA and C.diff, which multiply in the same environments as pests.

Well, what a pretty pass have we come to? While politicians of various colours throw seven shades of political shit at each other about who is to blame, and people try to weasel out of responsibility, may I give you the words of an expert.

"If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient because it is not her business I should say that nursing was not her calling.

I have seen surgical sisters women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a week down upon their knees scouring a room or hut because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power.

But I do say that these women had the true nurse calling the good of their sick first and second only the consideration what it was their place to do and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this or for the charwoman to do that when then patients are suffering have not the making of a nurse in them"

And who was the expert I quoted? Florence Nightingale, in Notes on Nursing: What it Is, and what it is Not, published 1860.

Time for nursing to get back to basics perhaps?