Katie: Not everyone is hygiene aware

KATIE DRENNAN is always on the lookout for dirt. At this stage, the 20-year-old is not even conscious of doing it; she just scans a room automatically.

Despite being a university student, there’s a lot of bars that she won’t dare enter. Once again it’s the dirt.

When she’s in a hospital — and she’s there a lot more than the average student — she’s always checking staff hygiene standards and often gives her ward a once-over with bacteria spray. Even her housemates have been subjected to a few lectures on cleanliness, she admits with a laugh. However, her behaviour doesn’t make her the butt of any jokes because Katie’s friends know in her case dirt means infection and infection means serious illness as she has cystic fibrosis (CF).

This year Katie, from Ennis, Co Clare, should have gone into third year of her business studies course at the University of Limerick but she’s had to repeat the second half of second year as she missed an awful lot of school and could not sit exams. She spent the summer in hospital. She counts herself lucky that she has been trained to administer IV antibiotics to herself, meaning she spends less time in hospital.

It is shocking that hospital can be one of the deadliest environments.

“When you are admitted to hospital, CF patients are supposed to be priority, but normally accessing one of the single rooms involves kicking someone else out, and you can’t always do that. Hygiene risks are one of the biggest threats in the hospital. Not everyone entering your room is hygiene aware. Not all people will come in gowned up and people don’t use anti-bacterial gel rigorously,” she says.

Katie spent her first 16 years accessing paediatric CF services in the south west. She says the transfer to adult services meant “a real down-scaling in quality”. Suddenly, she was being sent to general chest clinics that were practically humming with the bacteria. Up until August, there wasn’t an adult CF specialist at the Midwestern General Hospital. Katie’s great hope is that the TLC4CF group based in the south west will raise €3.2 million to develop an adult CF unit in Limerick. There isn’t a hope of the HSE funding this project, but they have pledged to provide staffing. So far, €1m has been raised. Plans were submitted to the planning authorities in August and TLC4CF, who are part of the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland, hope to begin work in two years’ time.

The planned unit at the Midwestern Regional Hospital will serve Limerick, Clare and Tipperary and will include five treatment rooms and eight high specification inpatient rooms.

* www.tlc4cf.ie