So a friend of mine who works in a smaller hospital in the suburbs was telling me about a JCAHO visit a couple of months ago...It seems that JCAHO was someplace and happened to glance at a sprinkler on the ceiling and noted some dust on it. Well a message went throughout the land about this. Soon managers and their supervisors and their supervisors were sending messages all over the hospital to promptly clean the sprinkler heads in each department.
In my friends department a man was seen, compressed air bottle in hand going from sprinkler to sprinkler blowing invisible dust off each head. And that, my friend, is how ridiculous things have become in health care.
Let sleeping spores lie.
ReplyDeleteWait! Re-think that. Isn't the how-ridiculous aspect not that somebody has to clean it now, but rather that people (not directing this at you personally in any way), many people, have been conditioned to accept that a dust buildup and/or lack of janitorial service or housekeeping is normal and acceptable?
ReplyDeleteAll commercial facilities like hospitals and offices have reduced the janitorial services and maintenance to the point that build-up of dust, dirt, and mold even occur, and I think that's wrong. It's a HOSPITAL, for crying out loud. I rather think that sanitized and "clean as a whistle" used to be the default standard and should still be.
(Yes, that same crayzee ex-RN-student still reads you, LOL!)
Some hospitals are nasty. The last one I visited had dust/mold/grime caked on the a/c vent, and a nurse kept trying to hand me the TV remote which I refused to touch because it had droplets of dried BLOOD on it. *shudders*
ReplyDeleteThe NFPA reccomends annual sprinkler inspections. This has been adopted as a standard by the JC and CMS.
ReplyDelete