Saturday, April 14, 2007

All Good Hope abandon ye who enter here


The supposed text at the entrance to Hell according to Dante's "Divine Comedy" is

"All hope abandon ye who enter here".
Maybe that is the new motto for the NHS, when we read stories like the the attached article reported succinctly in the Times today as follows:

Cleaners at an NHS hospital have been told to turn over dirty bed sheets rather than use clean linen. Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham advised its staff to “top and tail” used sheets to cut the £500,000 annual laundry bill.

Posters instructing staff that this procedure would save 0.275 pence for every sheet re-used were pinned on cupboards and doors leading to the A&E and maternity departments. A health worker said that new patients were being given the same sheets as the previous occupant.

A hospital spokesman denied the practice. He said the posters had been issued three years ago but had since been removed. John Baron, Tory shadow health minister, described it as a concern given that MRSA was such a problem in hospitals. Good Hope recorded 36 cases from April last year to January.

Now you might think that it is a bit too far on the scale of unbelievable cuts in New Labour's NHS, but I had a little story told to me by a close relation, who is an ex-nurse, of how some nurses she know's prepare if they have to go into an NHS hospital.

Apparently they pack two cases, one with the clothes and bits and pieces for their stay, and the other with cleaning equipment and sheets for their stay. Before they use the bed they will strip it, clean it and use their own sheets rather than put up with a dirty bed and the NHS supplied "clean" sheets.

Little wonder they do this when we hear stories like this. The full poem by Dante as translated by H.F Cary makes you wonder if he was thinking of the NHS when he wrote it back in the 1300's

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
Over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd:
Whereat I thus: Master, these words import.


Hospital ‘orders’ reuse of sheets-News-UK-Health-TimesOnline

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