The laundry in the bowels of Ninewells Hospital is all that lies between Tayside’s patients, nurses and doctors and blotchy bedding, unclean uniforms and shredded sheets. Yet many of us remain blissfully unaware of the hustle and bustle of this thriving industry that lies directly below our feet when we march along the corridors of the hospital. Here, in the final part of our series on support services, Emma Seith takes a closer look.

Washing arrives in the laundry in green and red bags, and if ever you should happen to lose your way and find yourself wandering around in the depths of Ninewells, I’d recommend steering clear of the red bags. These contain the really icky stuff, the stuff that is deemed too unsavoury for the staff to have to handle. Tempting though it is, I’m going to resist the urge to list all the things that could warrant a piece of linen or clothing earning red-bag status. Suffice to say that Ninewells is a hospital, operations are carried out here, babies delivered and well, people are sick.

Nevertheless, provided all goes according to plan, no really nasty surprises should hit the staff in the laundry responsible for emptying the red bags onto the conveyor belt that takes them to the washing machine. They might catch a glimpse of some fairly stomach-churning sights, but because particularly offensive items are wrapped in plastic bags within the red bags, there should be no awful moment where something cold and slightly damp touches their skin…

Of course, the dirty laundry can’t be washed while still contained within plastic bags, which is why these are specially designed to disintegrate when the water reaches a certain temperature. After that it’s up to scalding water, bleach and detergent to do the rest. In one week, the laundry gets through 625 kilos of washing powder and 400 litres of bleach.

Red bags are relegated to the lower level of the laundry, while upstairs, the washing contained in the green bags is laundered, tumble dried and then pressed along with the newly-washed and dried laundry from downstairs.

Before any of this can happen, however, there is that age old routine that must be adhered to in order to keep disaster at bay—pockets have to be checked. For us, the owners of the domestic washing machine capable of being loaded up with around six kilos of clothing, even as little as a tissue can be like a hand grenade in your wash, exploding in the drum and leaving everything you own covered in white speckles.

At the Ninewells laundry, items left in pockets can be not just a nuisance but extremely costly because of the sheer scale—the batch washer upstairs washes 35 kilos and downstairs 50 kilos. Sometimes, however, they can quite simply be dangerous.

Billy Alexander, laundry manager, says, “You name, it we have found it in somebody’s pocket. Remote controls for TVs, false teeth. If someone keeps a pen in the pocket and it gets into the wash, it costs us £200.

“Sharps, though, are the thing that you worry about. If somebody gets a needle stick, you don’t know where it has been.”

The laundry washes 150,000 items every week. Among these are over 30 different pieces including pillow cases, theatre gowns, towels, nurses’ uniforms and doctors’ white coats.

These are sent in for cleaning from all over Tayside as the laundry washes linen and clothing for everything from the biggest acute hospital to the smallest cottage hospital. In total the drivers of the laundry’s four distribution vans will visit 25 different locations, including the likes of Perth, Pitlochry, Blairgowrie and Crieff, picking up their dirty washing and then returning it to them cleaned and pressed.

Further rises in the items going through the laundry are predicted, however.

For around a decade, explains support services manager Brian Main, the idea of changing the nurse’s uniforms has been mooted and, come the end of this year, the new look should finally be introduced. Gone, therefore, will be the Carry on Nurse/Doctor/Matron image of the blonde nurse with heaving bosoms teetering around in a tiny dress and sending the blood pressure of male patients sky-high. Instead, in her place, will be a sensibly-dressed nurse in trousers and tunic.

So why will this affect the laundry? Essentially because there are over 2000 nurses in Ninewells and around 700 in Perth Royal Infirmary alone. At the moment, each nurse receives eight dresses, but with the introduction of a two-piece uniform, every nurse will effectively have double the clothing, and thus the laundry will have double the cleaning.

Regardless, the process will remain the same, with all of the washing going through the same 16 separate compartments of the batch washer for just over half an hour at temperatures, usually between 95 and 100 degrees, and certainly never below 75 degrees. Every 1.5-3 minutes a load is expelled from the end of the washing machine having had, in the final stage of the process, all of the moisture squeezed out so that a circle of compressed clothing and linen plops out at the end. This pizza-shaped mix of items is then moved on to the tumble dryers.

Once the washing has been dried, it is then pressed and folded by machines operated by the laundry staff and ready to be taken to wards within Ninewells or delivered to locations outside the hospital. Throughout the cleaning process staff make checks for quality and when an item fails to live up to standards it will be scrapped.

Margaret Williamson, who has worked in the laundry for 27 years, says, “Often you feel that the laundry is one of the forgotten services, but if you haven’t got a sheet to put on a bed or to do an operation on, what are they going to do?

“I have a real sense of pride in what I do, because you never know when somebody close to you will be the person using the things that we wash here. Basically, I want to give them the highest quality of linen we can because it could be one of my relatives.”

If Margaret or any of the other members of staff are in doubt when it comes to quality they can use a special tool which checks the whites are suitably bright. Essentially, if Danny Baker were to turn up at the Ninewells laundry, they should pass the infamous doorstep challenge with flying colours.

Nevertheless, while quality is paramount, a ‘waste not want not’ philosophy underpins the work that goes on in the laundry and if an item can be saved, it will be.

“We have a sewing room and its main function is to make repairs to the nurses’ dresses, put on the name badges and if a big sheet is damaged they might make it into a small one suitable for a baby’s bed, for instance.”

Recently, however, things haven’t been running as smoothly as they might and as a result the laundry is in for major upheaval.

Due to a series of glitches and breakdowns, it has been decided that one of the batch washers is on its last legs and come September it will be replaced for the bargain price of £1 million. This is not an exchange that will be completed overnight, however, and while the new machine (a monster in comparison to the dwarfish domestic) is being replaced, thousands of items of clothing will still have to be washed every week.

Thus, the laundry which is normally open from 7.30 am- 8.30 pm will be introducing a night shift in order to get through the usual volume of work. Hopefully, however, within three months the brand-new machine will be in place and the 115 full- and part-time laundry staff will be able to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to normal.