The ward looked good but what of the patients?

Iris took me under her wing and taught me the ropes of being a ward cleaner, which mainly comprised keeping out of the way of the doctors and nurses and not looking under the covers of any bedpan sitting in the sluice (it was a gynaecology ward and the sluice was sometimes home to the sadder side of women's healthcare). Co-incidently, Iris had a younger sister, Alice, who lived in Cell Barnes Hospital (where I'd had my first experience of hospital work as a volunteer). Alice's legs had been severely burned as a child when a flaming log rolled out of the fireplace and set fire to the hearth rug on which she was playing. After the accident Alice became almost entirely mute and developed frequent and disabling anxiety attacks. Her parents couldn't cope and she was eventually admitted for long term care. It happened at a time when plastic surgery options were limited and specialist psychological support rare. That she had survived at all was probably unusual in itself given the rarity of specialist burns units before the Second World War. After Iris and Alice's parents died, Iris continued to visit her sister regularly although she said her condition remained unaltered over the years and she rarely spoke. By then I had stopped visiting Cell Barnes but our common knowledge of the hospital fuelled many conversations in the kitchen as we washed up.

The ward was run by a Sister who was close (not close enough some might say) to retirement. She was German and ‘old school’. She purred after the consultants and shouted at the junior doctors. She rang the visiting bell in the visitors’ faces if they didn’t leave exactly on time and she insisted that all the bed wheels faced in the same direction so that the ward looked tidy. She was also well known for hiding in the large walk-in linen cupboard during a cardiac arrest call (fortunately rare in our area) and for delegating all difficult tasks to her very accomplished deputy.

The main ward was set out in the traditional ‘Nightingale’ fashion, with beds lined up either side and a table and some waist high storage cupboards in the centre. This was in the days when visitors could still bring in flowers which would then be left in vases in various stages of decay until we went and sorted them out. Although against hospital regulations, Sister insisted that we use spray wax polish on all the hard surfaces to keep the ward looking and smelling clean. We were supposed to use the damp dusting method as this was ‘proven’ to keep dust and dirt under control so we kept a spray can of polish and some dusters hidden on the ward to use when the supervisors weren't around. Despite Sister’s antipathy toward damp dusting she did allow the ward floor to be polished with the buffing machine, a big heavy machine with a mind of its own that took some mastering. Though difficult to control, the floors were left looking beautiful, slippery as ice mind, but beautiful all the same.

 

So the ward looked good but what of the patients?