[lettie]

An interesting link there Neil.. It's high time that the money controllers were made accountable. There will always be incidences of these infections without the adequate amount of cleaners available, sufficient cleaning products, inadequate visiting policies, inadequate training for staff and lack of sufficient screening of patients prior to medical procedures. Lets not forget that many cases of MRSA are brought in by patients and visitors. Mass screening of patients prior to surgery would be expensive, but not as expensive as the prolonged hospital stay, treatment, mortality and morbidity that these infections cause.

We need more domestic staff. At present 1 domestic can be expected to clean up to 3 wards during the course of a shift. This is unacceptable, there should be 1 domestic cleaning 1 ward. Handwashing has always been high on the agenda. Believe it or not the worst culprits for not washing their hands are doctors. If I am assessing a student or an NVQ candidate in care and she does not wash her hands or is wearing jewellery (multiple rings, necklaces, bracelets) or has not tied her hair up....... she fails. It's as simple as that. I am a fair person and I do make it my buisness to warn the students of this. If they choose to ignore this warning it's hard luck.

I have a feeling that if this law comes in there will be chief execs sweating all over the place, trying to recruit domestics, enable screening and train staff. They will be frantically trying to pull in money to do this.

As it stands at the moment, every nurse, midwife and health visitor is accountable for their own practice. Through supervision (especially in midwifery) these problems are identified. The NMC will also investigate individual nurses, midwives and health visitors where reports of bad practice are made. When reports of this nature are investigated and found to be justified the nurse may be struck off, put on supervised practice or demoted in some cases. All nurses know this.. If they don't, they should....