Cleaning up the hospitals
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The first thing to be said about the national review of hospital hygiene reported today is that it is good to see that a disgraceful situation is at last being addressed and prioritised. The level of infection due to poor hygiene is well established.
Last year, a survey of Irish and British hospitals determined that, here, about one in 20 patients acquires a hospital infection of one sort or another.
Some 10pc of these are the potentially fatal MRSA.
People are becoming all too familiar with the names of other nasty bugs that thrive in our hospitals, such as clostridium difficile and its virulent big brother, C Diff 027.
The report, by the Health Information and Quality Authority, which was established last year, has rated only one in seven acute hospitals as "good". The rest are either "fair", or "poor". None achieved a "very good" rating.
However, all things being relative, it is hard to know what exactly this tells us about the degree of cleanliness or dirtiness in most of our hospitals.
For example, can a hospital aspire to an "excellent" rating, or an "absolutely magnificent" rating? Should we avoid the nine hospitals which are rated as "poor"?
The reports on each of the acute hospitals that were visited make heavy reading for people who are not health professionals or civil servants. However, a sort of checklist at the end of each of the 51 reports gets down to the nitty and sometimes gritty.
Hundreds of areas are examined in fine detail. For example, in the case of Beaumont Hospital, "The following building components should be clean: Ceilings."
The answer? "No. Ceiling tiles were missing in many areas . . ." and so on.
To achieve a rating of "very good", a hospital has to have a lot more "Yes" boxes ticked than "No" boxes
Check lists will help hospital staffs identify problem areas.
However, again in the case of Beaumont, this is a hospital where more than 600 new cases of MRSA were identified last year and whose infection control team say that one in three patients with MRSA cannot be isolated because of overcrowding.
Where hospital hygiene is concerned, the devil may be in the detail, but sooner or later, bigger and more costly issues such as insufficient bed capacity will also have to be addressed.
