You may have seen reports during the past week of the many deaths over a short space of time in India’s Maharashtra Hospital – 35 over 48 hours but another 100-plus in the days following – which are being put down to poor hygiene and lack of cleaning. According to several reports, Government officials are blaming the deaths on a shortage of medicines, (which may of course have been the case) while the hospital is claiming that the patients were already in their last stages of life before being admitted. As is always the case these days, there were several videos supposedly taken at and around the hospital circulating online and while I can’t 100% verify that they were even taken at the hospital in question, what I can say with conviction is that the conditions they depicted were appalling.

It may be that because of a sudden influx of patients, or overspent budgets, that there weren’t cleaning staff or cleaning products to use, but what about the others? By ‘the others’ I mean those who allowed the environment to become so filthy… those who chose to drop waste where they stood or who saw someone else’s discarded waste and didn’t bother to pick it up and bin it or if there weren’t any bins, take it away with them? Those who left it to attract foraging animals and vermin? What about the relatives of those in the hospital’s care? Weren’t they aware that the filthy environment was likely to cause issues? What about taking responsibility rather than leaving it all to the cleaners? 

 

Many years ago, when my father was dying from cancer, I was grateful that he was put into a side room in our local hospital. Fetching him some water from his bathroom though, I was disturbed to see the state of everything, the basin and surrounds, taps and toilet were visibly dirty. I still chuckle at the memory of him berating me for cleaning his bathroom and me telling him that if the cancer wasn’t going to get him, the filthy bathroom likely would (at that stage I thought he was going to recover) and that I wasn’t prepared to let the staff wash their hands in the basin before examining his stitches. On another occasion he’d been lying on a hospital trolley that was splattered with dried blood. Did I ignore it? No. I found something to clean it off with and then washed my hands. Nipping a potential issue in the bud, as it were; a practice I feel we should all embrace if we see a need. 

 

Don’t get me started on the bed bug hysteria… are people in France really throwing their infested mattresses out into the streets? This will only exacerbate the problem!