Doctors are used to scrubbing up before surgery, but at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool they are being asked to scrub the wards as well!
Both medical staff and managers were asked to pitch in before a visit from the Care Quality Commission (or CQC). According to the BBC, the commission had previously criticised hygiene standards at the hospital when they visited in April of this year.
The hospital trust have stated that participation was on a voluntary basis however, Dr Jaswinder Bamrah of the British Medical Association has criticised the move as “not right” and many doctors felt under pressure to comply according to the trade union, Unison.
However, the CQC were said to be impressed by the way staff worked together to increase hygiene standards and hospital chief executive Louise Shepherd stated that she believed maintaining high standards of cleanliness was “everyone’s responsibility”.
The obvious question that this raises is one of staffing. It appears that for doctors to have to muck in with the cleaning of the wards that staffing resources must be low. There is no doubt that cleanliness is a vital part of any hospital functioning effectively, highlighted particularly by the MRSA infections which have dominated the news for some time, however it is not the role of the trained medical practitioners to have to divert their time away from caring for patients to clean the hospital.
Additionally, it is easy to raise questions about the normal standards of hygiene in the hospital if there is a necessity to draft in doctors to do these kinds of tasks when there is an inspection on the horizon. The risk is that with doctors busy performing these dual roles it will impact on their time with patients, leading to a poorer standard of care and leaving more opportunity for mistakes to occur which might cause injury to those patients. The hospital needs to draw a clear line under the roles of staff members and let them concentrate on what they are specialised in.
