01.22.06

The trouble with cleaning is it’s become a dirty word

Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 12:15 pm by Sarah

Don’t you just love the blame game about dirty hospitals? The consultants blame the unions. The unions blame the managers. The managers blame the minister. Last week the health minister blamed the filthy visitors. Next thing you know, someone will blame the patients themselves. Do they have to bleed so much? It’s so inconvenient.All is not lost. Jeanette Byrne of Patients Together last week announced a solution to hospital cleaning, 100% guaranteed. She’s seen it work repeatedly in hospitals. The best part of her discovery is that it is entirely in Mary Harney’s hands to effect. No negotiations with unions; no battle with vested interests. I don’t think it even costs anything.

All Harney has to do is . . . visit a hospital. The results are immediate. Buckets filled with vomit are emptied. Excrement is washed off doors. Lavatories are bleached. Wards are spruced up in expectation of the royal visit.

So if Harney could leave her important meetings and spend three days a week touring our country’s hospitals, they’d all be pristine.

Remember Helen Lucy Burke in her heyday, visiting hotels and writing censorious reviews? She’d remove pillowcases to see what lay beneath. She’d pull out wardrobes to check when someone had last vacuumed. She’d run her gloved finger along skirting boards, and under lavatory seats. Mattresses were dragged off beds.

Such was the terror of a visit from HLB that some hotels kept a photograph of her behind the reception desk. I am told she is diminutive, but she definitely sounds scary.

Harney is not a scary person, but by virtue of her office she instils the same fear. I am confident she could achieve great results. Given her high profile, identification by stealth is not required. People keep lamenting for the days when the matrons were in charge. Mary can be the uber-matron. Once she gets within a few miles of a hospital, the texts will start flying into the big wigs. “Minister on deck. Quick, where’s the bleach?” Despite, or perhaps because of, the simple brilliance of this plan, it won’t happen. We must look to other solutions. Do more audits, appoint more bureaucrats, spend more money. But it’s all pointless. Nothing will work because what is really required is a cultural shift of enormous magnitude. Cleaning is dirty work. Until cleaning becomes a noble profession we will never have clean hospitals.

It’s not just that cleaning has low status. Cleaning has no status. Nowadays it’s only done by poor labourers or rich neurotics. In some circles you’d be called a “Monica” for cleaning, a reference to the overfastidious character from Friends.

You have to be either down on your luck or insane to admit to certain types of zealous cleaning. If you’re caught with the toothbrush at the bath, you can try claiming to have PMT. In response, you’ll be given evening primrose oil and expected to snap out of it.

Strange, really, because cleaning is physically hard, requires technical knowledge and preserves both health and life itself. Until you’ve got down on your hands and knees and scrubbed a floor, who would believe the hard physical labour required to clean? And though it may appear unskilled, this is not the case at all. How many people have destroyed good clothes by laundering them incorrectly? Or used the wrong chemicals on surfaces? Or forgotten to check the sneaky little places where dirt congregates? Some people wash the bottom of the door before the top and then water streaks down and ruins what they just cleaned. When you don’t clean properly at home you can poison your family. When you don’t clean properly in the hospital you can kill patients.

So why is it considered the lowest form of work? Because it’s traditionally women’s work.

The crushing realisation that dawned on the second-wave feminists was that women would never be valued until their work was valued. The boredom and loneliness of cleaning their homes and caring for other people was bad enough. But nobody was going to say thanks and nobody was going to pay them. The only hope for equal status was equal money and therefore equal work. So women took on men’s work and paid other poorer women to do the cleaning for them. Then comedy writers on TV shows invented characters who were mad because they cleaned too much.

The same thing that happened in our homes happened in the hospitals. Up to five years ago “damp dusting”, which helps prevent MRSA, was the basic task of all student nurses. But just like the men at home, the men who ran the hospitals refused to place a value on the grubby work of cleaning. For years, nurses were refused decent pay rises on the basis that their qualifications were inferior to other medical staff who had attended expensive universities. You didn’t need Leaving Cert points to care or to clean, so it wasn’t worth paying for.

So the nurses did what the housewives did, and who can blame them? If the only thing the system appreciates is a university degree, then we’ll do one. Oh, and you can forget about the cleaning. Today, when nursing graduates arrive on wards from colleges, cleaning no longer appears on the list of their required objectives.

People expect cleaning to be a low-cost exercise. In most hospitals the cleaners are only present at certain hours and the suspicion is that the cheapest tender gets the job. When someone does decide to pay top dollar, the results are obvious. St James’s accident and emergency unit, the largest in the country, pays for 24-hour cleaning. It scored second highest in the national hospital hygiene audit published in October. When wards are only cleaned between 9am and 5pm, a spill occurring at 5.05pm doesn’t get cleaned until the next day.

But it’s easier to blame the public than to pay.

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