A brief glance at a tabloid newspaper is enough to illustrate the mileage the press gets from hygiene scares in hospitals.

Seemingly every hospital has been put under the microscope by the media – and they’ll inevitably slip up at some point.

Indeed, the NHS in particular is given a rough ride from almost all fronts.

According to the Financial Times, some senior Tory backbenchers have been campaigning to remove the protected funding status of hospitals. Meanwhile, tales of spending discrepancies, unhappy patients, disgruntled staff and superbugs lurking on every ward plague the NHS – and this cumulatively impacts the morale of a hospital.

According to the Mirror, below-par hospitals are to be taken over by regulators in three English regions that have hit breaking point. In Scotland, the future of the NHS in its current form is viewed as unsustainable.

Reputation savers

Yet the hospitals that fare the best out of all this chaos are the ones bouncing back from scandal. Such is the British love of the underdog, even when that underdog is a large medical institution, that a hospital on the up-and-up is celebrated by the press.

Craigavon Area Hospital, for instance, recently hit the headlines after removing traces of E coli from its hospital kitchens. Hospitals in Wirral, in another example of great PR, campaigned for better hand hygiene when the norovirus turned some wards into a no-go zone.

Hospitals will always struggle against the media machine – but they can take plenty of steps to combat bad press.

For a start, improving their healthcare waste service can help them in their PR and, with our service, will give them a hospital with comprehensive waste disposal.

Interested in avoiding the paparazzi? Then get in touch.