Thinking what they are thinking?

I'm back.



The Tories have this billboard (coincidentally outside Yeovil's Labour Club). The sheer cheek of that as an election poster takes my breath away.

I just happened to be sent the Cardiff University / UNISON report "Hospital Contract Cleaning and Infection Control" in the post last week. The pdf version is here. It presents a convincing case that the worsening of infection control in the NHS is a result of contract cleaning.

Basically the theory goes like this, since cleaning services in the NHS started being outsourced in 1986, there have been a downward pressure on cleaner numbers, wages have gone down (relatively), training has been squeezed out and retention has worsened. If you ask 1 untrained person to clean a ward instead of 2 trained cleaners, then it stands to reason that the quality of cleaning has gone down.

The rise in MRSA in today's hospitals can be directly traced back to the Tories health policies of the 1980s, although it must be said that Labour haven't done as much as they should in solving the problem.

But maybe that's being unfair on Michael Howard, maybe he realises the error of his ways and is promising to employ more cleaners and actually pay them more than Tescos does. What it is they say about private sector CEOs, you have to pay the right money to get the right people? Surely the same should be said about hospital cleaners. Unfortunately, the Tories don't want to employ more cleaners, they want to increase outsourcing to more parts of the NHS. But surely they want to solve the MRSA? It seems that the only policy they have is to "free" hospitals from the "burden" of telling the Dept of Health how much MRSA they have. So the Tories aren't even pretending that they will solve the problem, merely sweep it under the carpet.

Even for Michael Howard, that's disgusting.