You clean filthy loos, says nurse
A hospital patient with a drain in her chest claims she was told by a nurse to don a rubber glove and use a sanitary wipe to clean a soiled toilet herself.
Emma Ciardelli, 38, was at Waikato Hospital awaiting surgery for a collapsed lung when she needed to use a toilet.
But what she found in three patient toilets on ward M14 disgusted her. They were stained with faeces and one of them had blood on the seat, she claims.
Ciardelli retreated and asked a nurse how often they were cleaned.
“She told me to put a plastic glove on and use a sanitary wipe to clean the seat. I had a chest drain in which is an open incision with a tube going from my chest into a box I had to carry around with me.”
Ciardelli decided to “hold on” and complained to a doctor when she was being assessed for surgery.
“I was at the point where I was like, ‘I want to leave, I don’t want to stay here’. The doctor said, ‘Well look you can’t leave, because you could die’.
“Basically mum cleaned the toilets because she was panicking I was going to check myself out and die.”
She filed a formal complaint to Waikato DHB on Friday.
The DHB’s chief nursing officer Sue Hayward said if it was true they offered their “deepest apologies”.
“We’re very surprised and concerned that this could have happened as we would never ask a patient to clean a toilet,” she said. “We’d encourage her to make contact with us and put in a formal complaint so we can investigate this.”