A day with Annette Jeanes at UCLH

November 18, 2008

Email this news item to a friend/colleague

Alice Miles in the Timesonline reports on “Spending a day with the woman charged with keeping back the tide of infection at University College London Hospital”.

She writes “Most people’s daily briefings are mundane: some sales figures perhaps, a bit of staff news, an IT change. For Annette Jeanes, it is about life and death: the death of a person, the life of a bug. Her daily meeting with the hospital’s microbiologists sounds like a list of everything you or I would hope never to meet. You may not understand the words, but you know they are bad”.

Later she continues with a comment from Dr Vanya Gant, a consultant in microbiology and infection “Completely supportive of Jeanes, he said other staff regard her as a “rock-eating bitch”. (“That’s true,” she replied. “I don’t mind.”) “We have people with world-class skills,” said Dr Gant. “These people are world leaders, very often they are unique and to a certain degree they spin around their own axis with justification. So when we come along and say, ‘great surgery, mate, wash your hands’ - you get the point.”

Click here for the full news story.

More IV news at IVTEAM