How government doesn't make things work

Hospitals don't work. A retired professor was so appalled by the dirty conditions she found during a stay in hospital that she wrote a dossier about it. The conditions she describes were obvious, but oddly nobody knew.

No one at all. Imagine.

All the worthies are jumping into action. The local MP belatedly wants to know what's been going on.

Jill Galvani, the nursing director, said: "I was very sorry to hear Prof Wenger's story. I know how difficult it is to manage these patients with care and dignity.

"My experience on the ward was very positive. The doctors and nurses were adhering to hand hygiene at the bedside and whilst the ward needed to be decorated, I found it to be clean."

Gren Kershaw, chief executive of the trust, said: "The trust is continually monitoring cleanliness and is not complacent about infection control.

This is either astonishingly complacent, or a barefaced lie. Professor Wenger wrote that

In most instances, I needed to clean the lavatory seat before I felt I could use it.

The seat more often than not showed evidence of urine or faeces, occasionally blood.

I did it myself because often I could not wait for someone to come and clean it for me.

There was often urine on the floor, sometimes starting to crystallise as it dried.

Often I did not ask for help because it was clear that nurses were under stress to get everything done and often there was no nurse around.

The shower cubicle I used was dirty and the door was broken.

The grouting was filthy and did not appear to have been cleaned for a long time.

No bath mats were provided. There was one dirty plastic chair.

Obviously these were long term problems, and obviously there can be no excuse at all for them.

And more widely, the number pregnant woman contracting superbugs on maternity wards has risen by a third in a year.

So is the solution for the government just to do policing, and leave others to run facilities? Well, the state isn't even good at that.

It took it took the healthcare commission two years to produce the report on Maidstone & Tunbridge's hospitals which stated up to 90 patients had died from C diff while another 331 had caught the infection at the three hospitals in the trust.

And Ofsted's supervision of childminders is so ridiculous that in England the number of childminders has fallen by almost a third over the past decade, while in Scotland there is said to be an acute shortage. "Business leaders claim the problem is damaging the economy and forcing many mothers to switch to part-time hours."