Tory leader ‘mortified’ by slip-up during hospital tour

CONSERVATIVE leader Michael Howard visited Bloomsbury on Tuesday to tour the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery with Margot James, his party’s prospective candidate in Holborn and St Pancras.
He was there to talk about his plans to put matrons on wards – and to back up his claims that, under the Labour government, infection rates of the superbug MRSA had rocketed because of poor management.
But the Tory leader was embarrassed when he broke the Queen Square hospital’s golden rule of washing hands between seeing patients. After shaking hands with a woman in a side room, he then ignored a hand wash at the foot of the next patient’s bed. He later said he was “mortified” by his mistake.
But washing hands between patients was not enough to stop people becoming ill during hospital stays, according to Ms James.
She said Labour policies were putting lives at risk – and maintained Tory plans to appoint matrons who would oversee cleaning would beat the superbugs.
She said: “It used to be easy to keep a hospital clean. What you need to do is put someone in charge of the wards who is empowered to change the management of cleaning.
“If it is an external contract someone needs to get on to them immediately and get cleaning put right, and if necessary change the provider.”
Ms James, a businesswoman whose company, Shire Health Group, does PR for drug companies, added that she felt private companies who managed hospital cleaning provided better value for money in the NHS than their publicly-run counterparts.
She said: “A lot of public services are inherently ineffective because they are so monolithic.
“Choice drives standards up in any other walk of life.”
But her views were not shared by the patient Mr Howard failed to wash his hands before greeting.
Sofia Merrington, who has worked as a staff nurse for 40 years at Archway’s Whittington Hospital, is suffering from a brain condition called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which requires a five-day stay in the 231-bed hospital each month.
She said: “I can speak highly of how this ward is managed. The staff are dedicated and efficient and it is kept very clean.”
She added that she was undecided who she would vote for – she lives in the hotly-contested Islington South constituency – but revealed she had come to Britain in 1960 from Barbados to train as a nurse and criticised Conservative immigration policies.
She said: “We were asked to come to England to help the country and better ourselves.
“We were needed then and people are still needed now. We should offer opportunities to people who would like to live in Britain.”
But she added that nurses from Barbados no longer wanted to work in the NHS.
She said: “They tend to go to the USA now. They get better pay and working conditions there.”