Dirty hospitals need a Florence Nightingale

OUR health service could badly do with a 21st century Florence Nightingale.

It is obvious that nobody in this Government is in the same league as the Crimean War heroine who reorganised British field hospitals with a strong focus on hygiene, and helped bring the mortality rate in those awful places down from 40% to just 2%.

The admission by Health Minister Mary Harney, via a report from the HSE, that hygiene standards are inadequate in 91% of hospitals, and that Cavan rates as minimally compliant while Monaghan is only partially compliant, is a damning indictment at a time when patients are going into hospitals to be cured and coming out with MRSA and other superbugs.