Riddled with vermin

Burton

Come on, this is one of the largest bureaucracies in the world. With its huge number of buildings, it is normal that you will find rats and maggots. That's why people make a living catching rats and putting down 'roach traps.

On a more serious side, the real issues are why British hospitals spend Western European levels of money to achieve Eastern European levels of healthcare.

Simon Gregson

"The NHS is 60 this year. As a birthday present, Labour’s dragged it through the muck." That observation would be funny were it not so pathetic, pernicious and ill-informed.

simon hb

I'm a little lost by this story - the NHS Trusts have called pest control because there are signs of pests? Isn't that what they're supposed to do?

Or is the suggestion that somehow NHS buildings should be fly-and-rat-proof?

The scandal isn't that proper procedures are being followed for understandable problems; surely the problem would be if the NHS wasn't calling the pest control people in when it found a rat?

You can tell there's nothing much to this story when the list of horrors is reduced to including "a wasp's nest in A&E" to make up the numbers.

Edward Benson

Yes, this one reads like a Daily Mail lead.

Tiberius

Oh how the sacred cow must be worshipped!

Those first two posts are extraordinary, but do show, perhaps, the wisdom of Cameron to avoid the NHS as an issue in his first term.

Faceless Bureaucrat

Burton [9.12am]

“With its huge number of buildings, it is normal that you will find rats and maggots.”

Eh!? – Burton, are you a Labour Activist by any chance, or are you simply living in a parallel Universe?

For an investment of over £90bn over a 12 month period, one might reasonably expect the buildings to be ‘vermin free’…

Simon Gregson – I wasn’t aware this appalling state of affairs was supposed to be funny, neither is it “pathetic, pernicious and ill-informed.” What it equates to is a shocking indictment of the result of pouring unprecedented levels of funding into an archaic and unreformed public service. Mock the facts if you will, but this Labour Government may end up presiding over the collapse of the NHS, not through lack of funding, but lack of reform.

Gareth

I see the ZANULAB attack puppies are up early today.

TomTom

Privatising cleaning to firms like Brengreen made David Evans MP rich but did little for overall cleanliness. Now that asylum seekers are illegals are used by cleaning contractors and budget is skewed away from cleaning what do you expect ?

This is such a simple matter to deal with and should be the Chief Executive's responsibility not Gordon Brown's

Tim Carpenter LPUK

Yes, buildings should be vermin free - prevention, not cure...and these people are expected to run our Health service!

Of course, due to our Monopolistic Stalinist NHS, people cannot easily avoid any Hospital which has rats, so the consequences of their incompetence is limited.

Burton

FacelessBureaucrat: I'm no Labour worker. Since you ask, I'm a credit derivatives trader at a large German bank. Want to buy some GMAC protection?

Meanwhile, under my desk sits a cockroach trap. Work late at night on the trading floor and you see many rodents scurrying around, feasting on the crumbs of people's deskbound lunches. All this in a fine trading floor, where high tech IT is everywhere, where fine art adorns the walls and where some of the most exacting people in London work.

But it's normal. Big buildings with lots of people in them attract pests. The NHS has a large property estate and it's no different. What do you expect in a large hospital, some "forcefield" to repel rodents?

Like I say, the real issue is not discovering a wasps nest or a mouse in a ward, it's the poor results the NHS delivers. It's far more serious when people in Britain are dieing today when they'd be alive if they were using, say, the German system.

Austin Barry

In his 1946 essay 'How the Poor Die' George Orwell observed that the wards of his Parisian hospital were infested by crickets and that you wouldn't see such infestation in an English hospital. Well, crickets seem rather charming compared with the horrors currently lurking in our NHS establishments.

Familiar Clown

I don't agree with some of this stuff at all. I would be most surprised to see a wasps nest within a ward of my local hospital, let alone a mouse scurrying about. I don't know about basements or kitchens, but if cockroaches are found in Hotels the health inspectors come down heavily on them, and so it should also be for hospitals.

I agree, however, that the funding system in the UK is skewed. In W.Europe the insurance companies contribute large amounts in funding, everyone over a certain income level is insured, but there is no real private healthcare as we know it. Everyone is treated equally, whatever your wealth status may be.

Fergus Pickering

CAN buildings be vermin-free for ever? I'm ignorant about this but could rats and cockroaches be eradicated from the sorts of places they like to live without using rat-catchers and whatever you call chaps who kill coackroaches. Doesn't every house without a cat get mice? We get invasions of ants in our kitchen every year. So we slaughter 'em. And they are gone till next year. Don't supermarkets get rats in their stores? Are other health services totally free of rats and cockroaches? Does anybody KNOW?

MikeC

Burton @11:15

Yes and no... ok, with a large estate one would expect the odd problem with pests. Fair enough.
However, if you take a look at the BBC report that Peter links to you can see the scale of the problem.
The number of "pest control visits" per month in the worst performing trusts is staggering:

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust 41
Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust 35
Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust 33
Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust 33
Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust 31
Barts and the London NHS Trust 31
York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust 27
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust 25
Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust 17
East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust 16

So that's SIX NHS trusts who have are visited by a pest control guy more than once PER DAY...

Trumpeter Lanfried

Walk into any NHS hospital 30 years ago and you were hit by the reassuring smell of disinfectant. The nurses wore clean uniforms and white caps. Now, all too often, you are greeted by the smell of stale urine and the nurses are dressed like janitors.

I think there is more to come on hospital hygiene; more scandals, more avoidable deaths and more management cover-ups.

A friend of mine had a child in hospital. Someone (mentally disturbed) had smeared the lavatory wall with faeces, by way of grafitti. It took THREE DAYS of constant complaints to get it cleaned up.

Verity

Fergus Pickering - "...and whatever you call chaps who kill coackroaches."

Roach wranglers.

Tanuki

MikeC@12:23 - lots of visits from a pest-control operator are not automatically an indication that you have a pest-problem. Indeed, it can indicate that you are following best-practice to *prevent* there being a problem.

Google on 'perimeter baiting'; I spend a couple of hundred pounds a year on rodent-bait whose deployment ensures my actual buildings stay pest-free.

Fergus Pickering

My father was in the West Middlesex Hospital about twenty years ago. visited a number of times and I was not impressed. It was dirty and the nurses were rude and uncaring. Thirty years ago my mother in law was dying in a Catholic nursing home. I was not impressed by that either. She was afraid of at least one of the sisters, a Belfast woman I remember, harsh and (I thought) with a sadistic streak. Things may well be bad now but one ought not to idealise the past, though older people, like most of the bloggers here, like me, are inclined to do just that.

MikeC

Tanuki - good point. Lies, damn lies and all that!

Alf Tupper

Rats and roaches are everywhere. All businesses have to contend with the problem.

I have found hospitals in this country to be very clean places.

Sounds like another bit of lazy reporting to me.

Silent Hunter

Why is there a picture of a Labour MP heading up this article?

Silent Hunter

Burton:

'...Work late at night on the trading floor and you see many rodents scurrying around,...'

I thought you saw that during trading hours as well?

:OP LOL

Frank Pulley

At the moment the Palace of Westminster is infested with vermin. Now that is something we can do something about (as soon as they deign to allow the pest controllers (the electorate)to use their eradicators.