Attendants accompanying patients eat in the wards and the corridors of the hospital, littering everywhere. The walls and the floor of the hospital look dirty with the grime that has accumulated on them for years.

The foul smell of the rotten food which permeates through the hospital is nauseating and the sweepers say the attendants seem to hardly use the dustbins in the hospital which look cleaner than the corridors.

The unkempt condition of the hospital is due to the non availability of simple cleaning tools for the sweepers. “We do all the work manually, with the brooms and the buckets. This time we don’t even have the buckets and brooms and we wash the swabs with our hands under the taps,” said Sanitary Supervisor, Mukhtar Ahmed.

The sweepers say that they don’t even get the washing powder, cleaning soap and glycerine. “Before the hospital was shifted to this new place we used to get soap and glycerine at least thrice a year. Since 22 August 2005, after being shifted to G B pant, we have not been provided with Vaseline even once,” he said pointing towards his hands which looked rough and scaly.

The sweepers also attribute the poor sanitation of the hospital to the lack of security. With more than one entry points to the hospital, it has become impossible to control the influx of attendants coming from all over the valley.

“With just three security personnel in the hospital, it has become impossible to control the entry of the attendants,” he said. “Just three days ago a patient was accompanied by thirteen attendants and they had everything with them, from food to mats etc and you can understand how much load it puts on this small hospital”.

The attendants are also to blame say the sweepers. “What can we do, we clean the hospital, but they litter around, some of them bring washed clothes to dry in the hospital,” Ahmed said.

The bathroom doors in the hospital have turned black and the foul smell coming from them pervades through the corridors. The water keeps leaking all the time. With about thirty bathrooms in the 7 wards, the hospital has total of thirty four sweepers. “We work for 24 hours but thirty four sweepers are not enough, we also do the night duty with 2 sweepers for each ward who are replaced by others in the morning,” he said.

With just one incinerator, the hospital has gone into a contract with an agency that is to take care of the biomedical waste of the hospital. “We have found out an alternative to get rid of the waste. From March this year the Common Facility centre at Lasipora, Pulwama will take care of the biomedical waste, the hospital generates,” said the Medical Superintendent of the G B Pant hospital.