Carpet.

If there is one thing that should not be in hospitals, at least in the parts that have patients, is carpet. YUCK. Do you know what I get on my shoes on a daily bases? MRSA, CDiff. Blood. Patients leak on the floor on the way to the bathroom. They drop things. Their bandages fall off. NASTINESS gets on floors in hospitals. Up until last year when I first started working, we had carpet in patient rooms,which was gross. Then they got smart and my boss had it all replaced with linoleum. Ugly, but when a patient has a fem pop blow and looses have of her blood in two minutes flat until I can start holding pressure and yelling for help all I have to do is get house-keeping to come mop it up. When the patient starting chasing us in the hallway with a full urinal trying to splash us and then tripped and fell backwards and slammed his head into the floor and started bleeding out of his ear, that blood was still there nine months later thanks to the carpet. There is a limit to now much you can get out of carpet. Especially when it is ten years old and already full of nasty junk.

Nine months being the key word to when the carpet was replaced last week. We were all excited about the new floors, until we figured out that they were putting down more carpet. Yup. My hospital which is perpetually broke spent money to place more carpet down, not something solid that we can mop. want to see what it looks like?
(okay, so apparently I fail at paint and this pic is kind of small but if you click on it it gets bigger)

nice, huh? We are somewhat flabbergasted. The carpet is actually somewhat nice looking. At least it was, until like the second day after it was laid when one of B's patients managed to break his IV tubing, leaving the port open and blood pouring out of his arm. He walked out of his nice, linoleumated floor and onto our brand new carpet to get help. There is now blood all over that section of floor.

Blood that will probably be there for the next 10 years until they get around to replacing it again.

That, my friends, is why I will never like carpet. And why I will never wear work shoes anywhere but work.

(in other news, my dad had an article published in the Wichita Eagle about health care reform. He used some of the info I sent him... exciting. Click here to read it)