The Future of Health Care in America: Nurses Who Are 'Grubby, Drunken and Promiscuous'

Yes, if you vote for hope and change, you too can enjoy the wonders of socialized medicine like they have in Great Britain.

Really something to look forward to.

Maybe I'll go for drunken and promiscuous. Grubby, maybe not.

A Conservative peer has launched a stinging attack on "grubby and drunken" nurses at a hospital in Bath.

Lord Mancroft was treated there for gastroenteritis in 2007, but was appalled at the filthy condition of the wards and the heartless attitude of "lazy and promiscuous" staff.

He slammed Labour for still not having sorted out the NHS after ten years - describing the state of Britain's "horrible" hospitals as "internationally embarrassing and humiliating".

Lord Mancroft, vice chairman of the Countryside Alliance and a hereditary peer (third baron of Mancroft), was rushed to the Royal United Hospital in Bath in August last year after an attack of gastroenteritis.

Speaking in debate on patient care, he said: "I can tell your lordships only that it is a miracle that I am still alive.

"The wards were filthy: underneath the bed next to me was a piece of dirty cotton wool, and there it remained for seven days; the ward was never cleaned.

"It was a gastroenterology ward, with lots of people with very unpleasant infectious diseases. The wards, the tables, the beds and the bathrooms were not cleaned.

"I was extremely infectious at that time and no precautions were taken with me at all.

"The staff were furious when my wife wanted my bed cleaned when it clearly needed cleaning. I was just lying there, a pathetic person. It was appalling."

Worse still, he said, was the attitude of the nurses on the ward, whom he described as "an accurate reflection of many young women in Britain today".

Ouch.

"The nurses who looked after me - not all of them; we should never generalise and there were one or two wonderful ones - were mostly grubby, with dirty fingernails and hair," he said.

"They were slipshod, lazy and, worst of all, drunken and promiscuous. How do I know that? If you are a patient, lying in a bed and being nursed from either side, the nurses talk across you as if you are not there.

"I know exactly what they got up to the night before. I know how much they drank and what they were planning to do the next night, and it was pretty horrifying.'

He said it was "pretty unpleasant" to see how the staff treated a man next to him who was dying - and died virtually alone.

"The nurses thought that he was a nuisance. They changed his bottle, gave him his pills, occasionally fed him and propped him up."

No doubt this guy will get the best of care next time he shows up at the hospital.