BMJ  2008;336 (7 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.39602.443785.47

Editor's Choice

Complexity theory

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The American journalist H R Mencken reputedly wrote that for every problem there’s an easy solution and it’s "neat, plausible, and wrong." I say reputedly because I haven’t been able to check the original source—the BMA Library’s copy of The Divine Afflatus is out on loan.

The deep cleaning programme forced onto English hospitals might be a good example of such a solution. This week we publish a news story that suggests we should be looking again at overuse of antibiotics and the resulting problem of resistance (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39601.623808.4E), echoing the message of a report we published last week (doi: 10.1136/bmj.a175).

Could that be the answer, rather than bringing back matron to tyrannise the outsourced cleaning staff? Does that mean that the high bed occupancy and throughput rates in English NHS hospitals are irrelevant to the surge in hospital acquired infections, which apparently dates from the mid-1990s?

My . . . [Full text of this article]

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