Housekeepers and Janitors Need Praise As Unsung but Very Much Important
Remember when the NRA told doctors to “stay in their lane” RE gun violence and #thisismylane trended as a result?
One of the tweets I saw was a surgeon who’d taken a picture of her OR, having just finished surgery on a young man who’d been shot. Blood. Everywhere.
This bloke retweeted her, mentioning that he worked as a cleaner in a hospital and had had to clean up stuff like this and worse.
Surgeon replied to him (and went up *greatly* in my estimation) and, despite living in different countries, thanked him for his hard work.
I can’t find the tweets sadly, but hers went something like;
“Without a clean and sterile operating room to work in, my team, our skills and the best medicines in the world are next to useless. You are doing invaluable work, without which my work would be impossible.”
I work as a nurse, and a huge amount of the care credited to us is actually certified nursing assistants, or CNAs (or “techs”). These are the folks who do a huge amount of the grunt work of cleaning up poop, changing dirty linens, feeding people, getting folks up to the chair and back to the bed, back and forth to and from the bathroom, etc, and they get paid, like, half of what we do.
I never see “CNA Appreciation Week” or “we love our CNAs” or people talking about how amazing our techs are.
God bless our CNAs. And housekeeping. And janitors, and supply staff, and sanitation workers, and all those folks doing the grunt work of making sure we’re not living in filth.
shoutout to our housekeepers (who do the food here) and cleaners and stores, who keep our cupboards stocked and order the stuff we need!
I remember working on a frailty ward way back when, and we had the same housekeeper covering mealtimes. Our patients would often stay for 2-4 weeks (which is really long for NHS acute hospital) with their delirium, behavioural symptoms of dementia and medical problems, and she remembered what each patient liked. The meal replacement drink flavours they liked, what kind of meat they liked, etc.
They did MUCH more to ensure our patients got nutrition than I ever could. (apart from meds reviews, pragmatic instructions etc)
oh also the porters, who know where absolutely everything is!! my first day at my current hospital, it was a lovely porter who showed me where to go
Oooh and ward clerks, who often are the ones organising your transport out of hospital, making sure your notes get to where they need to go and perhaps most cherished for most people, picking up the phone and putting you in touch with your loved one on the ward or with the nurse or doctor to get an update on their condition. We love ward clerks. When they’re not there it’s a bad fucking day.
Also a shout out to dispensers, who are the ones you’re mocking when you talk about “just putting labels on boxes”, when actually they play one of the worlds deadliest match-up games thousands of times a day.
And lab techs,without whom nobody would have any blood results to make clinical decisions
And the wonderful people in the purchasing departments who are the reason there is enough fluid for people to get their IVs and the people who do all the desperate calling around wholesalers and beg and borrow from other hospitals to get that niche drug or maggots or leeches you need.
