Health Bill

I do not accept the hon. Lady’s description of what happens now: I have indeed seen that level of concentration on aseptic techniques, but I hear what she is saying. In my view, we should not strengthen the code in the way that she describes at this point, but I will reflect on this issue. We will have time to take such concerns on board as the Bill progresses—I hope—through the other place. I have sought to provide some reassurance on how seriously we are taking these issues, and the requirement that we have included in the code, measured as it will be by the Healthcare Commission, will be sufficient. However, we continue to listen on these issues. In Committee, the hon. Lady gave a graphic description of a visit to a hospital in which she met a nurse with what she assumed was spaghetti Bolognese over the front of her uniform. As I said in Committee, had I been that nurse’s manager, I would have expected her to have washed her uniform, or at least to have worn another one. However, as the hon. Lady says, one cannot always tell whether a uniform is free of germs, even if it has been washed, just as one cannot always guarantee that one’s hands are totally free of germs. I believe that the code as drafted would give NHS trusts a legal duty to ensure that such things do not happen. It would give relevant NHS bodies a legal duty to ensure that their staff had clean uniforms. How they achieve that would be up to them, which is what I meant when I said that the code is outcome-based. I realised that the hon. Lady did not have the benefit of the latest draft of the code, and she is obviously still disappointed with the current version. I hope that the redrafted code addresses some of the concerns and reassures hon. Members. While I approve of the amendment’s overall aim of ensuring that staff have clean uniforms, I am afraid that we disagree with the methods proposed to achieve that aim. Finally, for the sake of clarity, I should make it clear that in the Oxford study that I mentioned earlier, I meant 90 per cent. of the 25 per cent. of patients with MRSA who had been in contact with a hospital. I hope that that is clearer. For the reasons that I have given, I hope that the amendments will have served the purpose of probing the Government’s intentions in bringing forward the code and amending it as we have. I hope that the hon. Member for Westbury will withdraw his amendment, but if he does not I shall have to ask my hon. Friends to resist it.