Doctors in United Kingdom: Could they be a Source of NHS Hospitals Infection?

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Doctors in the United Kingdom (UK) working within the National Health Service (NHS) Hospitals are perceived as people that help treat diseases and save lives.  While this is true in many cases, it cannot be true in all cases.  Instead of being savers of lives, some NHS doctors appear to be a source of infections in NHS hospitals.  You might disagree with this assertion if you don't work in NHS hospitals and have no first hand experience of how doctors operate within the hospitals. As you read on, you would find out how doctors could be a source of infection in NHS hospitals rather than being the curers of illnesses..
Some NHS doctors tend to sit on patients’ beds and chairs when these doctors are doing ward rounds.  A ward round involves a situation in which a doctor or doctors visit patients in a ward to discuss the conditions faced by these patients, including any possible treatments for such conditions.  It normally occurs in the morning hours, and doctors conduct ward rounds bay by bay within a ward, and ward by ward within a hospital.  The question now is what is wrong if doctors should sit on patients' beds and chairs while doing ward rounds?

There are hygiene posters on the walls across NHS hospitals for hospital workers including doctors and nurses to adhere to in order to reduce the risk of spreading diseases and infections across hospitals and the general public.  Some of these hygienic practice include:

  • The washing of hands after making contact with a patient or patient’s bodily fluid.
  • The use of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, aprons and mask when making contact with patient’s bodily fluid such as urine or blood.  



The rationale is that following this practice could help control the spread of bugs, bacteria or viruses, which may be inhabiting in one patient, to other patients who are free of such bugs.  
hand hygiene


However, doctors who ignore this hygiene practice and sit on patients’ beds or chairs have the potential to spread contagious bugs from one patient to another.  This becomes worrying for the fact that patients in hospitals as a result of their illness may have weak immune systems compared to the immune systems of the general public.  As a consequence, these patients could easily contract any bugs pass over to them by their careless doctors.  


There is an anecdote of a man who claimed that her mother in-law may have died as a result of the carelessness of her doctor.  According to this man, his mother in-law died from an Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) related illness.  This man stated that his mother in-law contracted the MRSA after the doctor who was attending to her in her sick bed picked up a fallen swab stick on the floor and dipped the stick in the mother in-law’s mouth.  It could be possible that this woman contracted the MRSA following this swab by her doctor.  However, it is also possible that the woman may have already contracted the MRSA prior to the swabbing.  Whatever the case, the person making this claim could not make it had the doctor that attended to his mother in-law followed good hygiene practice.

In conclusion, there is no amount of infection control measures put in place across the NHS hospitals that could be very effective unless doctors that engage in the unhygienic practice of sitting in patients’ beds or chairs stop the behaviour,.  Stopping these culprit doctors from ruining the NHS hospitals is not easy as the culprit doctors may not recognise that their behaviour is a major risk to NHS hospital. Let me know if you have a solution to this problem.

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