I'm back. Actually I was back a fortnight ago but have been too ill or busy to write anything. To be honest, it's looking a bit crammed until the end of the year, and then 2008? I'm not sure I have the willpower any more.

Got back from Frankfurt to find a curious situation: a serial killer is running loose in the UK. You'd be forgiven for thinking that a killer with more confirmed kill to their credit than Fred & Rose West, Dennis Nilsen and Peter Sutcliffe combined might be subject to a bit of priority from the government. The final death toll in fact, although by no means confirmed yet, is second only to the suspected number of deaths from Harold Shipman.

Yet faced with 90-odd deaths from hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile at the Maidstine and Tunbridge Wells trust, the government sat on the report for three months. Hospital infections from C. diff. outbreaks had been charted since May.

Clostridium difficile is not a "superbug". It's easily treated, and can be kept under control with antiseptic. It's been allowed to butcher patients because hospital cleaning has been outsourced to save money and to drive the fallacy of the private market for the NHS.

This has resulted in barely-literate staff being employed who use rags on both toilets and sinks, don't clean things that "don't look dirty" and whose supervisers do not understand what "infection control" means. Well, they're cheap I guess. The only downside to scraping a few pounds off the budget is that people die - if they're old, like H's grandmother, I don't suppose it matters in the government scheme of things (it stops them claiming benefits, after all).

Modern nursing is starting to focus less on basic care of a patient, and more into guideline-led areas of medicine that used to be done by doctors . . . who are by and large fucking off abroad with the rest of the qualified nursing staff to get better wages and working conditions, and less interference in their job from witless, incompetent ministers.

And hospitals (no longer with that awful smell of bleach which at least betrayed the fact they had been cleaned recently) can't afford enough good staff on a permanent basis. They are stillpaying over the odds for agency nurses, some 15 years after this was highlighted as a problem.

My father-in-law had a hernia operation recently. No keyhole op, they opened him up from sternum to waist - yet despite major abdominal surgery he wasn't followed up by the surgeon, and ward rounds were non-existent. No-one helped him to get up to the toilet, he was even discharged without given a wheelchair, so was left to hobble his way in agony out of the hospital.

This is in one of the hospitals facing closure under the Labour health reforms. God knows, no-one likes to lose a hospital, especuially one with an emergency depatment . . . But I wouldn't want to have an operation there.

So . . . wouljd we have quite the short-term memory about this scandal if say, Myra Hindley had been given a golden handshake instead of a prison sentence? It may be a bit much to expect hospital chiefs to face time for avoidable patient deaths, but surely something a bit sterner is required than leting them quietly shuffle off into another directorship after an unapologetic resignation?