Guidelines are needed on hygiene

THERE can be no excuse for the shocking conditions of hygiene revealed in a damning report that will inevitably be seen as a shameful league table of Ireland’s dirty hospitals.

By any standard, the first national audit of cleanliness in the State’s national acute hospitals is a slashing indictment of a system where patients are put at risk of infection from life-threatening bugs like MRSA which flourish in unclean environments.

Of the 54 publicly funded acute hospitals examined, only five were rated as having ‘good’ standards.