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EXCLUSIVE: NHS 'hygiene' exposed as a sham at two of Britain's leading 'hospitals'

• Whistleblower NHS nurse lifts the lid on New Labour's 'Operation Deep Clean' and exposes a system of incompetence, public relations spin and staff cutbacks leading to poor hygiene in ongoing Superbugs crisis

Anonymous NHS nurse............... Chief Exec Peter Homa

RATS AND MICE AT NOTTINGHAM HOSPITALS - FULL STORY....

A nurse at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has blown the whistle on a regime of underfunding and poor hygiene in the NHS despite government assurances that a 'Deep Clean' programme was being implemented to tackle the Superbugs crisis.

New 'mystery bugs' are causing a soaring number of infection outbreaks at Nottingham hospitals. The latest figures show outbreaks have nearly doubled - to 48 from 25 - in the last year at the City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre. The number of patients affected has hit 550, up from 340 in 2006/07. But the usual culprits - MRSA and Clostridium Difficile - are not to blame and figures for the two superbugs are actually falling.

But the whistleblower nurse, who we will call 'Sally', not her real name, has revealed that standards of hygiene at the Queen's Medical Centre have improved little and that the Government's 'Operation Deep Clean' has not been carried out at the hospital and "is not likely to be done in the near future either".

At a time when the QMC is beset with outbreaks of new mystery superbugs, increased hygiene should be paramount but in the last 24 months cleaning staff have been laid off! This damning disclosure should set alarm bells ringing as to whether the NHS Trust is in control of hygiene and properly understands the necessity to conduct 'Operation Deep Clean'.

Gordon Brown came into office in June 2007 and almost immediately promised that all NHS hospitals would undergo an extensive 'Deep Clean' to alleviate the Superbugs crisis but this has either not been done at Nottingham's two main hospitals or the programme has failed and needs to be repeated urgently.

The whistleblower nurse, who has worked in the NHS for over a decade and earns approximately £30,000 a year, insisted on remaining anonymous to prevent disciplinary action. The nurse said: "Even though I am highlighting some serious problems at Nottingham's NHS hospitals, I will not be thanked by the management and they would simply implement a witchhunt against me to drive me out of the NHS. It's another serious problem in the NHS that there are too many managers drunk on power who do not really understand what nursing staff have to put up with. And instead of praising nurses who highlight problems like I've described, we are treated as little more than canon fodder."

And the whistleblower nurse also added that in the near future many more nurses would follow the same route out of the NHS into private medicine or take jobs abroad. 'Sally' now intends to look for work abroad and feels that she has donated too many years to the NHS and received little in return for over a decade of sacrifice.

Featured below are a set of photographs 'Sally' took inside the City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre. She insists that the hospitals are not routinely dirty, as shown below, but that there are not enough cleaners to cope with the cleaning demands of the hospitals. Sally said: "It's not the cleaners' fault, it's the fault of the management and the Government."

SALLY'S STORY:

I went into nursing to help people in distress but the things I have seen in the modern NHS have made me not want to come to work. The situation's so bad I'm applying for jobs abroad in Australia, Canada and New Zealand . And I'm not the only nurse trying to get out of the NHS, quickly….

I'd like to say that things weren't always this bad but when I think back over the last few years since I joined the NHS as a trainee nurse, I think it's always been this way and is getting worse.

Of course, the NHS I joined was living under a fresh optimism what with New Labour and Tony Blair having come to power just weeks before. I guess all trainees were filled with an unrealistic hope that the NHS would be improved by New Labour but all they've done is throw money at management in the ensuing years.

At Nottingham's Queens Medical Centre the situation is far worse than its sister hospital, Nottingham City Hospital, just three miles away but poles apart despite the short distance and being 'managed' by the same NHS Trust.

I work in both hospitals as a staff nurse in what is a tense, occasionally exciting but usually overworked, oppressed environment. Most of the oppressed feeling is imposed by middle and senior management to meet unrealistic government targets. The simple truth is that New Labour are obsessed with targets and performance tables and these have blighted the NHS, the Police, and all State-funded departments but particularly the NHS.

Just how on earth can I justify telling an old age pensioner, already confused and worried about coming into hospital, that there is "no bed for them today" and to "call back tomorrow". This creates unacceptable tension and worry for pensioners especially but affects everyone else as well.

I hate having to lie to people but that's what we are expected to do almost as naturally as other people draw breath and some of my colleagues have lying down to a fine art. Often I am instructed by doctors and senior nursing staff to tell patients there is no bed because of "overcrowding" or "a lot of beds have been taken by A&E admissions caused by accidents." Sometimes it's true but most of the time it's just a lie to explain away staff shortages, and outbreaks of Superbug infections.

I have told people phoning to find a bed on the day that their operation has been cancelled for a variety reasons but it's usually down to Superbug infections causing patients to occupy beds for longer which simply worsens the problem.

And Consultants, who work in both private practice and the NHS, spend too much time away on fee-earning 'medicine'. There is a real friction now between nurses and Consultants who swan around the place like Gods, dictating orders to their 'juniors'. I don't think a Consultant who 'works' a few hours a week in the NHS has the right to tell me what to do and thinks he knows better than I do what needs to be done about shoddy conditions on wards.

I work on wards all the time, in between filling in mounds of paperwork, I know what patients need on a daily basis for their hygiene. The problem is that a Consultant pitches up for his few hours and starts throwing orders around but he's not there 80 per-cent of the time. Then our schedule is thrown into disorder as we work to the Consultant's instructions and then when he's gone, we work to the usual schedule and time is wasted on changing things around again.

A famous case was when a Consultant, with a head bigger than an average mountain range, walked onto our ward which was running smoothly and started barking orders around in front of the patients. It was all show and no substance. It happened several months ago in the grip of another C.DIFF outbreak.

The Consultant started telling nurses to get their uniforms changed and their hands scrubbed, hair tied back properly etc. and this seemed to put a rocket under us. But all of us were clean enough, having scrubbed before entering the ward and after treating each patient. He made us look stupid and the patients looked at us with suspicious eyes afterwards, almost as though we were dirty and could not be trusted unless there was a Consultant on the ward.

I cannot repeat in words the abuse levelled at him behind his back when he'd gone after two hours. Word was he the went to see the management, probably Peter Homa, and sold them the line that he'd just knocked the ward into shape and the C.DIFF outbreak would soon be under control.

Actually, at the time and even now, we send most patients who develop Superbugs on hospital wards home to recuperate after doctors have assessed their condition and laced them with a cocktail prescription of anti-biotics to take. They then go back to their GPs for regular assessment and in serious cases are readmitted to hospital.

I have seen patients die as a result of Superbug infections and its awful and sometimes I cannot get their faces out of my mind. One woman in her late sixties came into hospital for a simple surgical procedure. Two days later she became seriously ill and tests came back from Microbiology as MRSA positive.

I cared for her as best I could, considering there were 30 or so other patients to tend to at intervals. It's so depressing and very exhausting and each day is like having been in a battle and then it goes on and on. Needless to say, this female patient died three weeks after being admitted to the Queens Medical Centre in good health. The dirty bloody hospital killed her, simple as that.

But that's not what the Consultant and his lackey doctors told her family. On the contrary, they said she had developed pneumonia and renal failure and had battled to save her life and done all they could which was also a lie.

In the first instance this patient should have been isolated from the other patients but she was simply left on the same ward with 5 other patients on her block. There seems to be little provision for patients with Superbugs to be put into isolation from other patients, i.e. in a single room. The best way to deal with Superbug infected patients is to isolate them in quarantine, so to speak but I have never seen this procedure implemented and there are no plans to either.

I could barely look the relatives of this female patient in their eyes. Her son was just devastated. I went off for a 30 minute break afterwards and just sat and cried. My colleague came into the toilets and asked what was wrong, I told her what happened and she confessed she was leaving the NHS to work abroad. She was also a good friend and I just cried even more, a double blow in one day on top of many blows day after day.

We are supposed to be ultra-professional and clinically detached but in reality that waffle just means not giving a shit about what's happening to the NHS and its patients. And there are more than enough staff who fall into that 'category'. They're the promotion hunters out to feather their own nests, out our expense and the expense of the public.

And then there's the blame culture and I don't mean staff blaming each other either, I mean no one takes the blame! Everyone is obsessed with blaming away negligence, incompetence and every type of balls up on "matters beyond the hospital's control". Which for the managers means giving the government and Department of Health the best possible press by pushing policy 'initiatives'.

The QMC was supposed to be cleaned up in the government's "Deep Clean" operation but it has not been undertaken and will not be now is the word from upstairs. The middle and senior managers seem more interested in the NCRS than Superbugs and hygiene.

In fact, the government has paid £12 billion for the National Care Records System (NCRS) so far and it has not improved the NHS one bit. It does not even work and probably won't be online for another 2-3 years anyway. What a criminal waste of money which should have been spent on cleaning up all hospitals.

At the QMC, around 30 cleaners were sacked over a year ago at a time when we didn't even have enough. Cutbacks are being made to pay for a bloody stupid computer system instead of paying for essential services and cleaning is an essential service because it helps to prevent Superbug outbreaks. How does a computer system clean up a hospital?

Now, it's almost impossible to find a cleaner on a night shift at the QMC and City Hospital . And, it usually falls to staff nurses to do the cleaning on the wards which I don't mind if there is blood which should be cleaned up right away.

I can ask a cleaner to clean up a mess and sometimes it is still there several hours later, including blood, excrement, urine and other human discharge. I am so tired of this and patients are developing hospital acquired infections which even the Labs cannot identify. There is a great deal of confusion.

I've took all of this crap for years and nothing is getting better only worse. I do not believe anything that comes down from management and I don't believe a word that comes out of this government either. It's all public relations nonsense and downright lies!

As a result, several weeks ago, at great risk to my career, I decided to take some photographs of the mess in both hospitals. Had I have been caught, I would have been suspended on full pay, and then probably dismissed from the NHS on disciplinary grounds.

In fact, that could still happen if I am identified as a result of blowing the whistle in this article. But isn't that just the problem really in that I am blowing the whistle to show the public what's actually happening inside the NHS. If I get caught, my career is ruined and on one wants to employ a whistleblower, someone they can't 'trust'.

Instead of getting to grips with the problems I've highlighted here, the middle managers will be on a witch hunt to find out who has caused them so much embarrassment. And the answer is very simple, they have! not me.

Depressingly, I dare say that nothing much will change for the better after this disclosure and certainly not overnight. But I feel much better knowing that I have stayed true to my original career ambition to make a positive difference but sadly it seems the only way I can make a difference now is to blow the whistle.

And soon enough, I will leave the NHS and never return. I am actively pursuing jobs abroad without my bosses knowing. The whole NHS is in a state of paranoia, secrecy, and fear because many people want to speak out but run the risk of being sacked and replaced by someone from abroad.

My heart bleeds for the NHS and within 10-12 years PFI contracts will effectively privatise most NHS hospitals and create a two-tier 'healthcare' system. 'Thank you' Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, you have ruined the NHS and that should be your legacy.



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