Many years ago, I worked in what used to be a fevers hospital before it was turned over to mental health. The wards were housed in two storey pavilions, with walkways connecting them. My ward was on the ground floor and I had an office to myself, with an ensuite toilet. It was the largest staff space on the ward, so we held our team meetings in my office. The consultant I worked for (most definitely not with) always availed himself of the facilities before the meeting started. I think it was his way of marking his territory, to let me know that he controlled the space, not me.
Once a week there was a patients’ meeting held in the patients’ lounge, where they were encouraged (by the consultant) to air any problems. One day, someone asked if the walls could be washed, pointing to the nicotine stained ceiling (those were the days when smoking was allowed almost everywhere). The consultant’s answer astonished me. The décor wasn’t important, he said. It was the fact that they were getting treatment that mattered.
In a later job, I worked in a hospital where the junior staff had offices without windows. If you wanted to know what the weather was like, you had to visit a patient bay. I often emerged from doing my paperwork to find it was a beautiful sunny day or that a thick carpet of snow had fallen. It was good that patients got daylight, but here it was the staff for whom the décor was not deemed important
In another job, I worked in one of the last asylums, now converted into ‘luxury’ flats, where the corridor from one end of the building to the other was a third of a mile long. My on-call room had no wash hand basin. I cleaned my teeth in the kitchen sink. Why there was a kitchen sink I do not know, as there were no cooking facilities. There was, however, a trade-off. The grounds were lovely, the staff dining room was huge and the food plentiful and tasty. The patients didn’t do quite as well. The wards were locked and there was little privacy, but they did get the use of the grounds, which led to some interesting encounters.
Not all my places of work were quite as awful as these, and times have changed. The importance of environment on patient health has now been recognised, and newly built hospitals, in other words built in the last 20 years, are reasonably pleasant for both patients and staff. It would nice to be able to say that hospitals like the ones I’ve described no longer exist, but sadly that wouldn’t be true. The windowless hospital is still going strong, as is the most recent hospital I worked in, which has the air of a workhouse crossed with a prison.
I suspect patients and staff alike will have to wait a long time for all the crumbling buildings to be replaced. A recent Kings Fund report highlights that the cost of refurbishment has more than doubled in the last 10 years, and includes a graphic description of what dilapidation looks like. I don’t need a report to tell me. I’ve been there, with windows that don’t open, radiators whose valves are stuck, broken chairs stacked in the corner of the room, toilets with dodgy flushes. Not to mention IT systems that don’t work and pass cards that won’t let you pass.
Other work places are not exempt from similar problems. I’ve visited some terrible social services offices and some equally terrible police stations and detention facilities, and I gather that many government offices are not all that great. But there’s something particularly upsetting that sick people and the staff who care for them are expected to tolerate these depressing conditions.
To add insult to injury, I once attended a training hosted by a major law firm. My colleagues and I tiptoed around in wonder. Soft leather couches in the reception area, sleeping pods for late workers, fridges filled with cold drinks, coffee bars, readily available bowls of fresh fruit, properly soundproofed offices, the latest ergonomic chairs, tasteful colours and expensive art on the wall. The imbalance between private and public sector was never so stark.
I’m not asking for a workplace that looks like a five star hotel, lovely though that would be, just a place where there is properly regulated heating and air conditioning, the bathrooms have hot water, the floors are clean, the chairs are not stained, the IT system never crashes and there is a private place where staff can eat wholesome food and relax.
Maybe I should go work for Google.
The curse of windowless rooms ...