Basic commodities like soap are still not being provided in toilets in all public hospitals, the lobby group Patients Together claimed last night.
Its spokeswoman Janette Byrne said this was still the unfortunate reality at a time when millions are being spent on hospital cleaning services.
New figures released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published today show at least €68 million was spent on cleaning the majority of the State's public hospitals last year.
The figures come as the Health Service Executive (HSE) has engaged outside consultants to conduct an audit of cleanliness in hospitals across the State. The firm is carrying out unannounced inspections and will report to the HSE by the end of next month.
The cost of the audit is not being released, the HSE said yesterday, arguing this information is "commercially sensitive".
The figures for amounts allocated to hospital cleaning in 2003 and 2004 indicate that despite suspicions cleaning budgets had been cut by hospitals to fund other services, this does not appear to be the case. They show cleaning budgets in many main hospitals increased dramatically last year.
In the case of Dublin's Mater hospital, the cleaning budget increased by €876,552, and at St James's Hospital it increased by €690,000.
However, at the Mid-Western Regional Hospitals in Limerick (which include the main regional hospital and the city's maternity and orthopaedic hospitals) the cleaning budget allocation in 2004 was down €249,531 on 2003. Similarly, the amount allocated by Tallaght Hospital to its cleaning budget in 2004 was €259,233 less than in 2003.
Ms Byrne said there was absolutely no excuse for hospitals not being clean when taxpayers were paying "top dollar" for cleaning services.
However, she said cleaning staff claimed it was impossible to keep some departments such as A&E units clean because of overcrowding.
Fine Gael health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey said the fact the cumulative cleaning budgets for more than 30 hospitals were up more than €5.8 million last year did not mean more was spent on cleaning. He claimed most of the increase would have gone on wage rises.
"It is only when we deal properly with the problem of cleanliness and hygiene and infection control in our hospitals that we will see huge increases in hospital cleaning budgets," he said.
However, he stressed that €68 million was a lot of money to have been spent on cleaning if hospitals were still not clean. "Most people have experience of going into hotels and pubs and seeing details of when areas were last cleaned and by whom. We should have that also in our hospitals," he said.
Labour health spokeswoman Liz McManus said a lot of money was being spent by hospitals on cleaning, yet the situation was not at all satisfactory.
"It does raise a very specific issue about the privatisation of services . . . there are questions around whether it's the most appropriate way to clean our hospitals," she said."Hygiene issues will arise when hospitals are so busy, no matter what their cleaning budgets are."
Attention is focusing on hospital hygiene as public awareness grows of hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA thriving in unclean environments.
Minister for Health Mary Harney said in the Dáil in July there was "no excuse for low standards" of hospital hygiene "when huge money is being spent on cleaning programmes involving both in-house cleaning and outside contracts".