ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Hospital patients in Venezuela are relying on visitors to bring vital hygiene supplies such as soap and water as the nation faces a major economic crisis.

A TV news report also revealed that hospitals have little running water to clean their filthy toilets and showers, and that staff have no access to cleaning products for use on wards.

When a Sky News team secretly filmed three major hospitals around the capital Caracas in recent months it revealed a bleak situation with no imminent solution in sight. Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America but now has a crumbling health service with minimal supplies of medicine and medical equipment.

Patients lie in filthy wards with no air conditioning and no clean water while bodies are left in corridors because the morgues are full and the refrigerators are broken.

Without the aid of their families, patients would receive nothing but medical expertise from healthcare staff since visitors are asked to bring in medicines, bedding, food, drinking water and soap for the patients' personal hygiene.

To add to the misery, vector-borne diseases such as Zika are on the rise without the necessary health infrastructure in place to prevent its spread. As many as 500,000 cases are estimated to be present in Venezuela while malaria has also made a comeback due to the lack of clean water and stagnant reservoirs in the countryside.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world but has been in crisis since oil prices fell. The nation's economy is expected to shrink 10 per cent by the end of 2016 while inflation reaches more than 700 per cent.