Nuns knew how to deal with hospital bugs
Without a doubt, there has been a falling away in hygiene standards in Irish hospitals and care facilities. I think this fact was tragically illustrated by the events at Leas Cross nursing home. Somebody has lowered the bar considerably with regard to what is an acceptable standard of hygiene, and raised it to an unacceptable level with regard to what is not.
But who? I remember a time when the standard was high, and nothing less was acceptable.
In 1977/’78, I worked as a domestic at the Bon Secours hospital in Cork when it was run, and I mean that, by nuns who knew what cleanliness was. They would pass you by in the hall, white veil and habit flapping in the wind created by their tornado-like cleaning flurries, leaving a smell of bleach and Dettol in their wake.
You could have eaten your dinner off the floor in any of those wards and lived to tell the tale.
Cleanliness and disinfectant were bywords for those nuns. Everything was washed and scrubbed, not just rinsed with some environmentally-friendly unidentified liquid.
For instance, every Wednesday was ‘menage’ day, which meant the floors, walls and ceilings in every ward were scrubbed with disinfectant soap.
We domestics hated it, of course, because that was hard work, but the only infections present in that hospital were the ones that came through admissions, and they were soon knocked on the head by a carbolic soap-wielding nursing nun.
Gaye Walsh
827 NE 100th
Seattle
Washington 98125
USA
