While travelling in Russia in the fall of 1993 as a Citizen Ambassador for People to People International, I had the opportunity to visit the Russian Children's Hospital of the Ministry of Public Health of the Russian Federation, located at 117 Leninsky Prospect in Moscow. The sanitary conditions I found there were deplorable, to the point of disbelief.
I witnessed conditions that I could not believe existed in a hospital of today, especially in a country where human resources and technical knowledge have supposedly abounded for decades. I saw surgical floors that had not been scrubbed, let alone washed thoroughly in ages. There were cigarette butts accumulating on ward, hallway, and stairway floors. There were windows that were either broken or missing totally and not replaced or fixed. I saw doctors wearing smocks that had to have been at least two weeks without a washing. There were communal bars of soap and cloth hand towels being used by the doctors prior to, and after, surgery. I saw an open garbage collection pit on the premises where the refuse is quite often burned in place when not collected by the City of Moscow. The hospital staff hand washed surgical gloves and air-dried them for future use. There were bandages in the physical therapy area that were ready for use yet blood stained from prior use. There were cats roaming the hallways. I was to learn later that these cats were crucial for the hospital's rodent control program.
After returning home, I took it upon myself to organise a working custodial delegation to return to the Children's Hospital to assist in cleaning the facilities and to train their custodial staff (nurses) in proper cleaning and sanitising techniques. This was accomplished in the fall of 1994. I returned to the hospital with a delegation of 25 working custodians from the United States and approximately US$350,000 worth of chemicals, supplies, and equipment. We spent ten working days at the hospital and were able to clean approximately 13% of the facilities, plus train 47 nurses and technicians. We also installed 165 soap dispensers in critical areas and provided the hospital with over a year's supply of surgical hand soap for their use.
We, Ms Virginia Ross and I, are organising and co-leading another delegation to the same hospital wlth a re-supply mission and to further their training in September '95.
To date, we have 30 custodians, environmental specialists, doctors, electricians, and lay people signed up to be a part of this much needed humanitarian delegation. We have the chemicals we will need donated by a company in Brussels, and some of the supplies and equipment we will need have already arrived here at the college awaiting shipment to Russia In July. We will be taking more soap dispensers with us, and we are also hoping to take washers and driers with us, if we are fortunate enough to find a donor, as the hospital has no internal means to launder anything.
What finer way towards making the world a better place than by providing a clean atmosphere for the children of Russia to live in while they are receiving medical attention in their country's largest children's hospital.
In closing, I will leave you with my feelings as to why I started, and why we are continuing this solution to the social problem of substandard health care being provided to the children of Russia. That is, it is far less expensive for the hospital and so much easier on the children and staff if we combat Infection at its source through the use of proper sanitising chemicals and cleaning techniques, as opposed to fighting the cause with expensive medicines, as just about every other mission attempts to do. Dr. Drosdov, head doctor and hospital manager, agrees.
Virginia Ross and Robert Thomas, Department of Physical Plant and Security, Cornell College, 600 First Street West, Mount Vernon, Iowa 52314-1098, USA (tel 319 895 4272; fax 319 895 4129; e-mail: <b.thomas@cornell-iowa.edu>).
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