TV agony aunt takes a hand-on approach in battle to combat hospital super bugs

TV agony aunt Claire Rayner has joined the battle against super bugs by visiting the children's ward at Northwick Park Hospital.

Mrs Rayner joined nurses dressed in giant cat and dog suits to teach young patients the importance of washing their hands with a special hand wash to kill germs.

Mrs Rayner, a former nurse, attended the hospital in Watford Road at the beginning of the month as part of a three-year campaign to combat MRSA and other potentially lethal infections.

Mrs Rayner said: "Infections are a very real and current problem in hospitals. The weak, young and elderly are most at risk with the worst outcome being death."

She went on to say: "By encouraging patients to ask doctors and nurses to wash their hands, and staff to inform patients of the same, these unnecessary infections can be avoided."

The Harrow resident aims to raise awareness of the issue nationally.

Schools and old people's homes are her next priorities.

This story was something I found while trawling the local hospitals for press releases. They provided me with Claire Rayner’s telephone number so that I could conduct a telephone interview. Claire, a busy woman, was hard to get details out of initially but once I had her in the flow of conversation she forgot about the other issues she had to attend to and we had quite a long and detailed interview.

This piece was about the time of the MRSA scare so it was well suited to the local paper. Also the fact that she is famous further influenced my decision to choose the piece as one that would appeal to the local reader. Also the child angle was good since a large number of this suburban local paper readers would be families.

I tried to keep it concise and to the point while also being light-hearted where possible as it was a story about positive effort to make a change. The level of seriousness was maintained as the issue which washing hands aims to avoid, is a very sobering one.

The fact that this event was happening at Northwick Park Hospital which had just be in the news, with regards to testing gone wrong, made it more eye caching to the reader.

The length of the story was governed simply by the depth of the story. Since it held a certain value to the reader, but would turn into a health lecture if delved into further, the length of the story was kept short and punchy.