'My newborn was wrapped in the linen my team cleaned - it was unforgettable'

At the heart of Nottingham City Hospital's campus lies an industrial behemoth. Machines worth millions of pounds rattle with hundreds of kilograms of dirty laundry in a huge warehouse - yet many people have no idea it exists.

Nottingham University Hospitals' (NUH) laundry room sorts, washes, dries and folds around 225,000 items a week, and staff say there is nothing they cannot clean. “We get really heavily soiled sheets, some covered in blood," said service manager Alex Simonyi.

"Staff think this will never come out but in our machines they will definitely come out. We get any kind of bodily fluid you can imagine but everything comes out, apart from oil, so we ask staff not to put them on the floor."

Bed sheets, curtains, pillow cases, gowns, pyjamas, towels, mops and scrubs are among the items processed at the unit. Each day, 38,000 pieces of linen and upwards of 6,000 mops are cleaned alone.

The laundry room receives the dirty washing which gets disinfected and loaded into bags by hand and carried around on a conveyor belt. They are washed at 75C in industrial-sized washing machines for 45 minutes, progressing through 11 wash stages including pre-wash, main wash and 'neutralise'.

They are then dried, before being ironed and folded by machines capable of doing hundreds an hour. "We send it back to hospital cupboards and it’s magically there in the morning," said Mr Simonyi.

“We have to work efficiently, there’s not much room for error. People don’t realise how much equipment and technology are in a factory like this.

"It takes three or four months for an operator to be fully trained." The 39-year-old, who joined the job in 2021, said it was an often underappreciated part of the hospital.

“A lot of people don’t even know the place is here," he said. “It’s hard work. Imagine being here in the summer trying to get all this linen out as soon as possible. It’s a hard physical job."

Mr Simonyi recalled the "unforgettable" moment his own baby son was wrapped in the linen his own team had washed. “It was the first time I had to use the linen. I put on the scrubs, all the staff were wearing my scrubs," he said.

“They took my son out and wrapped him in linen that my team delivered. It was rewarding, I’ll never forget it."