Filthy Bedlams
An appalling report in The Times on 15/12/05 (it has taken me a while to catch up!) on standards of cleanliness in English hospitals. To quote........
''The six dirtiest hospitals were all NHS mental health hospitals......Worst of all was Barrow Hospital in Bristol....It had 'an unacceptably dirty environment' the commission's inspectors said: floors marked with cigarette burns, stains on the chairs, food on the floor, graffiti-daubed walls, a ventilation grill thick with dust and dirt, cobwebs, dirty windows, urine stains and mildew and stains from bodily fluids on the bottom of a hoist chair.''
Given my own experience of the standards of cleanliness the last time I was in a mental hospital, this report and these conditions came as no surprise to me. Mental Health is at the bottom of the pile as far as the NHS is concerned - and within Mental Health services hospitals are at the bottom of the pile ; Care in the Community (which is an admirable goal) being the preferred option. But there will always be some conditions and some patients for whom time in hospital is either necessary or desirable - and they are among the most vulnerable of all patients. That far from a safe, clean, reassuring environment they can be faced by filthy holes is a disgrace and scandal.
In September 1968 I spent a week at Leeds City Hospital. I was having what
was termed a "nervous collapse." The corridors were filthy then, but I
remember the room being clean. I was treated as a self-indulgent freak.