I had to use the men's toilets on the ground floor and the shared individual cubicles on the sixth floor regularly. The floors were inevitably sopping with used paper towels strewn about. The toilet seats were broken, unhinged, wet, stained or all of the above. Needless to say, the stench was unbearable.

What I found most distressing was the sorry state of the shared cubicle outside the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) on the second floor. Metres from what is supposed to be a sterile environment, the tap above the sink in the cubicle was not even working. There was no sterilised mat at the entrance of the ICU, which meant anyone who had just stepped out of the toilet would carry whatever creepy crawlies their shoes picked up from the wet floor into the ICU.

Excuses of constant human traffic and insufficient cleaning staff cut no ice with me. The standard of hygiene in a hospital is supposed to be - pardon the pun - whiter than white. If NUH cannot rely on toilet users to be civilised, it should increase the number of times the toilets are cleaned every day.

Wee Kek Koon
Hong Kong