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Comment by askyourmother | Hacker News Reader

One of the most important jobs in a hospital, is the cleaner. To help prevent the spread of infections like MRSI, to help keep outbreaks of vomiting virus under control, and help reduce the number of admitted and post procedure patients dying as a direct result of infection acquired in the hospital itself.

And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences.

Society has some warped views sometimes.

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> Society has some warped views sometimes.

At the moment, stopping to help a homeless person isn't worth anything. We should live in a society where helping someone in need makes you a millionaire. Where people are out hunting down the homeless, fighting to help them.

A society where helping a kid to become happy makes you rich. Making a classroom of kids happy and teach them something at the same time earns you tens of millions a year.

Talk about rose tinted glasses! You would need to invent some new product that did those things for kids and convince parents to buy it, otherwise no one will ever pay you millions to make kids happy and teach them something.

That's the point I was making. In a post money society (think reddit karma or Star Trek) this could be a thing.

The money loving capitalist couldn't imagine being rewarded for helping someone. It makes me sad.

I suspect that the reason they are so low paid is because it is a job that can be done with the minimum of training, and so it is easy to find replacements.

except when there is a general shortage of workforce

Doctors are also important. And nurses. And the admin team. And the cleaners....

I didn't say they weren't important. But, what a waste, when the doctor saves the life via an operation, the nurse administers care, and the patient dies from an infection acquired due to a dirty ward, when it could be so easily avoided, by respecting the important role of the cleaner, starting with actually making them employees, paying them well, proper training, materials and care, and finally, giving them respect, so they feel proud, as they save the life just as much as the doctor or the nurse.

Not saying that isn't important, but at some point, the cleaning only takes a certain level of skill.

Having a trashy ward - is much more likely a failure of the management / admin team in training & superversion than it is on the cleaner specifically.

Not saying you should treat cleaners poorly, but it does explain the wage level.

What a waste, when a patient dies in a shining, clean ward because no doctor was there. ;-)

But I agree, cleaners should be more respected.

And now that we've stated both boundary conditions, we can have a productive discussion - is the pay allocation in a hospital arranged optimally in terms of lifes saved and if not, then how can we shift the arrangement (i.e. who should be paid more, and who less) to maximize the effectiveness of that hospital in saving lives?

Do you have any reason to believe it's suboptimal? It doesn't seem particularly implausible that the current allocation is close to optimal, and presumably hospital administrators and the like look at the numbers and allocate resources where they think they will most effectively lead to saved lives, no?

Doctors are harder to train, as such they are a rarer resource, and more expensive. We can freely pay cleaners less, and purchase more doctors. Isn't that how it works?

Yes, but hiring more doctors is counterproductive if their work is regularly being undone because of bad sanitation. In such a case, a dollar invested in cleaners buys a greater fraction of lives than same dollar invested in doctors.

> a dollar invested in cleaners buys a greater fraction of lives than same dollar invested in doctors

the dollar equation is relative, i.e. "in such a case". The balance point still ends up with doctors being payed more, and cleaners significantly less.

Plus, who guarantees that dollar cleaning improvement? Maybe all you'll be doing is setting a precedent for higher pay - you need more to correlate with better cleaning. Maybe regular (independent) inspections & testing?

They are valuable, except for the fact that machines can now do the disinfecting aspect of the job (the most important part) better and faster than they can.

See: http://tru-d.com/

And to the point someone else made in this thread, they are easily replaced; not requiring a significant amount of training or onboarding resources.

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