When I recently visited a friend at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, I was staggered to see that chunks of plaster had fallen out of the walls in the ward.

And various pieces of equipment and trollies were randomly spread over the floor space, making proper cleaning impossible.

We keep hearing about empty wards in the hospital, so can I suggest that one of these is refurnished properly, to the standard which you would expect to see in such a hospital?

Then a ward-full of patients could be moved in while their old ward is refurnished and so on, until all the wards have been refurbished.

This would pay for itself through the drop in MRSA cases which would result and which currently need expensive treatment to cure.

-Simon Gould, Brighton