When you run a hospital, you are a life-saver. But behind the success are small daily tasks that need precision, sanitation and physical labour. So whom do you hire to do all the monotonous work and still get no complaints?

A Scottish hospital decided to go for robots. In an out-of-the-world move, Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Stirlingshire, is slated to become the first hospital in the United Kingdom to welcome our mechanical counterparts to their staff. It has even constructed a special network of corridors for these dedicated workers to commute and on board sensors will guide them to their duties.

“The new hospital will be packed full of design features to improve patient care and improve the life of staff,” said hospital spokesperson Ian Mullen. “Members of staff will use a hand-held PDA to call up the robot to move meal trays, or linen, or whatever. The robot will come up in the service lift by itself, pick up the item and go back into the lift.”

Unlike in sci-fi flicks though, instead of a bright Rise-Of-The-Machines future, the robots are mostly intended to procure more free time for the staff to spend with the patients. Also, as is every boss’s dream, these employees will do all the dirty stuff without sulking and also do them more efficiently without compromising the overall hygiene levels.

“Traditionally, clean and dirty tasks are carried out by the same person,” said Lesley Shepherd, an infection control nurse.  ”Here, you’ll have the robots that do dirty tasks, so they may take dirty linen or clinical waste away, and you’ll have robots that do clean tasks, such as bringing meals and clean linen to patients. They have separate lifts so there’s no way they can cross, which is great.”

Currently testing their automatons, the new £300m hospital is scheduled to inaugurate in August. Enchanted by the various jobs a robot can be made to do, there is just one prospect that would probably scare me if I somehow land up there: robots are also in charge of drug dispensation; imagine someone doing some little fixing on that one. You can be sure I am laying low now and trying to make as few enemies as possible.