Health Bill

I understand exactly the point that my hon. Friend makes and he is right. At the heart of what we need to achieve is an assurance that action will be taken by the NHS that delivers vastly improved infection control procedures across the board, so that our constituents are reassured. I have visited Kettering district general hospital and I know that it is a very good hospital, but—as my hon. Friend knows—the public need reassurance. I shall give my hon. Friend an example of the kind of measures that need to be taken. We have pressed on the Government for a long time the need for more comprehensive recording of data on infections by clinical department. That is not only because that is the basis on which action should be taken inside a hospital, but because it provides more meaningful measures for those outside the hospital. For example, when I visited the Lister hospital in Stevenage, there was much local concern about the level of MRSA infections. When I talked to staff, it became clear that the hospital’s problem was associated with the fact that as well as being a district general hospital it was also a regional centre of excellence for kidney dialysis. It had problems with access to operating theatre time and the extent to which patients on dialysis had to be catheterised, which led to infections. Those distinctions were not known and understood by the local public, because the one figure published by the Government showed that the hospital had a lot of MRSA. The public need to know what is really going on. Information is at the heart of the issue, but the Government continue to resist the National Audit Office’s proper call for data to be published by clinical department.