Further Confessions of a GP

Hospital deaths

There have been a fair few doctors and nurses over the years who haven’t exactly covered our profession in glory. It’s understandable that medics who have either deliberately or accidentally killed their patients make headline news. However, just occasionally, there are hospital deaths that aren’t solely the fault of the medical staff.

One medical team in a hospital in South Africa started noticing that each Saturday morning a patient who occupied a certain bed on the intensive care ward would be found dead with no apparent cause. Initially it was considered a morose coincidence, but soon staff realised that there must be some reason for the patients in this specific bed to all die within a week of arrival on the ward. The doctors feared the bed was contaminated with some sort of killer bug that was infecting the patients. Appropriate investigations were undertaken, but no bug was found. Presumably because of a lack of beds, or an unwillingness to give in to superstition, the killer bed was always refilled with a new patient each week, but the mysterious deaths continued.

Until, one day, somebody took notice of the cleaning lady as she did her weekly Friday-evening deep clean. The cleaner entered the ward, unplugged the life-support system beside the bed, and plugged in her floor polisher, before spending half an hour cleaning the ward. The staff finally realised what had been happening. Over the noise of her polishing machine, no one would have heard the gasps for breath and the death rattle from the desperate inhabitant of the ‘killer bed’. The cleaner would then plug back in the life-support, leaving a lovely clean floor and a dead patient. Labelled in the press as the ‘South African Floor Polisher Massacre’, the exact numbers of people who died still isn’t known!

(Disclaimer: I have absolutely no evidence that this actually happened, but I read it on the internet so it must be true?!)