If you ever have the misfortune to sit bedside vigil in an NHS intensive care unit – as I once did, daily, for a month – you will learn that the only balm for your terror is its handmaiden: awe.

In crisis, in extremis, the ministrations of the nursing staff are beyond belief or expectation. No patient is alone for a moment, no sore untended, no fluid unmopped, no brow unstroked. No exasperated voice, regardless of fatigue, is raised in anger (unless you, the sorry visitor, once fail to disinfect yourself, fingertip to armpit) while floors are scrubbed, by the minute, to the point of erosion.

There are all manner of people hurling blame for the 90 deaths in regular wards in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells. Government says it is a local matter, locals say otherwise; nurses blame management and management says, well, most of their nurses are proper angels – but some did fall short of the dedication required to defeat C. difficile.

I’m guessing that each has a point; certainly, when it comes to the Kent nurses, I believe that most did their best under often needless stress. I also believe, however, because evidence is overwhelming, that some nurses – the old rotten apple syndrome – did neglect, did idle and did, indeed, instruct the dying elderly to poo in their beds, then lie in it.

I further believe this: that from my experience, and from others’ in intensive care, it is inconceivable that any such rotten apple would get the chance similarly to poison an intensive care unit (ICU). What, then, is the difference between a regular ward nurse and one working in an ICU? About six grand.

An ICU nurse, who has chosen to specialise, can earn up to £31,000; one who has not so chosen has a ceiling of about £25,000. And so what, you say: in every trade the more studied and trained gain seniority and higher salaries. But if it is a matter of life or death, and if it is the case that better-paid nurses are better nurses – “vocation” notwithstanding – we might revisit the thorny question of nurses’ pay in general, which is, as ever, less than is earned by teachers or police.

Nobody suggests that if you give a nurse a bonus she will then, but only then, reach for a bedpan; if, however, all nurses’ income was as deserved, health trusts wouldn’t need to employ even one such sloth in the first place. As with any employer, the more you pay the pickier you can be.

Alan Johnson, the Secretary for Health, is partly right to say that skimming germs from linoleum is not directly a matter for government; he is not expected to wield Dettol. Nevertheless, a radical review of the standard we expect, not from most but from all nurses, and of how we properly reimburse it, is his business. The laws of economics might not be his area of expertise. But even he must know the one about peanuts and monkeys.

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