Back to square one

Guess what? The edict has come down from on high. The MRSA screening time is back down to one month again. I would have claimed that it was this blog's influence, except that the descision was made on the day the previous post came out. Never mind, at least we won't have to cancel patients caught in the two to twelve month trap.
I suspect there's some sort of boardroom battle going on between the management and Infection Control, I wouldn't be surprised if there were further changes. But for now I'm rooting for the management.

Sad news

*sob* I didn't get the Poet job. But I was up against people who've done this sort of thing before, so I'm not too downheartened. At least I tried for it. I now await with interest the arrival of the successful candidate through the doors of the Eye Pavilion (with a fully loaded, semi automatic sonnet!)

Carry on screening

Up until the beginning of this year, it was standard operating procedure to screen patients, who had stayed overnight in hospital in the previous month, for MRSA, before they had an operation. Since the beginning of this year, it has been extended to a year. The result? We're getting a slew of unscreened patients who fell outside the one month cutoff when they were assessed, but are now within the one year cutoff. If a patient's MRSA status is in doubt, they have to go at the end of the list, so that the theatre can be deep cleaned afterwards. Which is all well and good, if there's only one such patient. What happens when you get two, or three? It hasn't happend to us yet, but it will. I expect somebody will just have to be cancelled.
So why don't they just screen everybody who's been in hospital overnight? Do you know how much that costs. I've just found out. One MRSA swab costs £32 to process. And you need five of them for an MRSA screen. That's £160 per person. £1000 buys you six. £1 million buys you six thousand, which is the output of about five or six wards in a year. One hospital's yearly total could be £5 million. Two hundred hospitals could spend a billion pounds on MRSA screens alone.
That's the sort of serious money the Government have to be willing to commit to fight MRSA.
What are the chances?

News flash

I've been telling people at work that I've started stripping on the internet. Before you start running around screaming "The Horror! The Horror!" and start burning your eyes out, it's not 'that' kind of stripping. I've discovered a site that lets you produce your own comic strips. If you want to see what I've been doing for the past week, click on this link: http://deaconbarry.stripgenerator.com/ and then you can start screaming...

I'm in ur oshuns, eating teh internets

The Indian internet has been severely hit by the as yet unexplained malfunctions of three submarine telecommunication cables off the coasts of Egypt and Dubai. Now on cabble being damaged is unfortunate, but, meh, stuff happens. Two cables getting damaged is a coincidence, but three? At the same time? That's a conspiracy surely? What are the odds of three cables going offline in the same month? I have heard it being blamed on ship's anchors, and certainly it makes more sense to put incompetence ahead of intrigue when looking for the answers to life's mysteries. I think, if another cable gets knackered, we're looking at vandalism on an oceanic scale. Either that, or Spongebob Squarepants has got a lot of 'splainin' to do.