IT should be obvious that hospitals have the potential to harbour far more germs and disease than most other public buildings. People are admitted to hospital when they are suffering from contagious disease themselves. Hospital patients are susceptible to contracting infections and they can go on to develop additional health complications as a result of increased physical vulnerability. 

Preventing cross-infection in hospitals is not only key to patient recovery, it is key to protecting the workforce, so rigorous infection control should be an integral part of the running of a hospital. No-one wants hospital staff to be off sick unnecessarily or for patients or hospital staff to die from hospital-acquired infections. No patient should ever be discharged from a hospital in a worse state than when they were admitted. 

The result of years of outsourcing of hospital cleaning means that staff, patients and the public can no longer feel confident that hospitals are cleaned as thoroughly as they should be. When some cleaning staff took up voluntary redundancy at St Georges hospital in 2019, GMB Union was shown pictures of the accumulating dirt and filth including rolls of dust building up underneath hospital beds on wards.