Giuseppe Del Percio from the bed centre

29. May 2020

This page has been translated automatically.

The coronavirus pandemic also means a change for the staff at the UKBB bed centre. Giuseppe Del Percio from the bed centre is not letting it get to him. A visit.

There's a lot going on in the basement of the UKBB right now. Three nursing staff come out of the underwear vending machine and disappear into the cloakroom laughing, a member of the housekeeping staff pushes his parcel trolley through the wide corridors, and along a wall with an oversized metre tape painted on it, a patient on crutches makes cautious attempts at walking together with his physiotherapist.

Before you even turn the corner and reach the colourfully lit corridor leading to the university hospital, you suddenly find yourself in Giuseppe Del Percio's realm: the bed control centre.

This is where all hospital beds are serviced, cleaned, made up and prepared for their next use.

While his colleagues wash and iron the laundry at the back of the bed centre, Giuseppe Del Percio stands at the front and receives the beds to be cleaned. Since the coronavirus pandemic, he has also been wearing the necessary protective equipment with a face mask and everything that goes with it.

It doesn't seem as if this distracts him from his usual work in the slightest. The 62-year-old's moves are just as good as ever.

He will soon have been working at the children's hospital for thirty years, and has been in the bed centre for nine years. And you can see that when you watch him wipe the plasticised mattresses, clean the frames and check their mechanics with swift, precise movements.

If the bed is covered with a protective film, Del Percio knows that it was used by a patient who had an infection. It therefore requires special cleaning. After cleaning, he has to scan the barcode attached to the bed. This documents the cleaning in a database.

Del Percio originally comes from a village near Naples, "3,500 inhabitants and fortunately not a single case of corona," he says with relief. He wouldn't want to live there any more, but he always enjoys visiting friends and relatives from his old home. The last time he was there was in February. Now he hopes to be able to travel there again in August.

When Giuseppe Del Percio emigrated to Switzerland, he was just 18 years old. He worked in construction until his back no longer wanted to. In 1991, he finally moved to the paediatric hospital. His wife, also Italian, had worked in cleaning at Basel University Hospital. Then, in the early 1980s, two sons were born. Today, one son is an accountant, the other a professor of sociolinguistics in England, as Del Percio proudly explains.

In all the years that Del Percio has been working for the children's hospital, a lot has changed, of course. Many cleaning processes have been automated. Back then on Römergasse, everything was very informal, but today everything is one size bigger. "I hardly know any of the young doctors any more," he says. Nevertheless, he is still very happy at UKBB. "I love my work!"

Of course, all his colleagues in the team, who always help out when there's a fire somewhere, contribute to this. But there's something else that makes his working day in the basement even sweeter:

Since Giuseppe Del Percio started working at the bed centre, the radio has been on practically non-stop. "90 per cent Italian music," he adds with a laugh. Although he and his colleague Corrado Gambone are the only Italians in the team, he often works alone. So of course he chooses the music himself. And that is at least as important to him as getting out into the fresh air during breaks. "I actually always have lunch outside, even in winter. I just love it!"

Giuseppe Del Percio is retiring in two years' time. What is his wish? "That my son moves to Switzerland so that I can always see my grandchildren," he says with a smile, before putting his face mask back on and moving on to the next bed.