Christmas Adjournment

I, too, extend my good wishes to everyone for Christmas and hope everyone has a wonderful new year, especially the staff, and especially those in the Members Tea Room, who are marvellous. They serve us all year round and never complain, so I wish them a very happy Christmas. When the House adjourns, we will all go home tonight to our families. In my house, we are all in excited anticipation as we await the arrival of my mother, who could be described as a cross between Ma from ““Bread”” and Hyacinth Bucket. At least my mother will be with us for Christmas and we will enjoy her company. Unfortunately, there are many people in my constituency who will not spending time with their loved ones over Christmas, and people who are in particularly difficult situations. That is due to a hospital superbug known as MRSA. Let me give the House a little background information. One in nine people who go into hospital contract MRSA, and of those, 13 per cent. die and the remainder can lose limbs or have their lives blighted. A constituent of mine has with her at home her 83-year-old mother, who is desperately poorly and needs to go into hospital to be cared for. However, the family has been faced with a decision. They have been told, ““If your mother goes into hospital, it is almost certain, because of her immuno-suppressed state as a result of her illness, that she will catch a superbug and will not come out again, but if you keep her at home, we can try to do our very best to ensure that she recovers.”” My constituent’s mother will therefore spend Christmas being nursed in my constituent’s home, receiving not the full health care that she should be receiving but only the best that can be given to her at home. As an ex-nurse, I would say that we could take people who are sitting in the Public Gallery to a hospital and ask them how to clean it. It is not brain surgery to know that we need to go back to wet mopping. It is not clever to know that we need to start using anti-bacterial disinfectants and handwashes. We need to wash down lockers and beds. Beds need to cool down. One of the big problems is that Government targets mean that as soon as a patient leaves a bed another patient goes straight into it. It is called hot-bedding—patient out, patient straight back in again. Staphylococcus aureus grows and survives on warmth, so it loves a warm bed. We need to start laundering uniforms on site and to stop staff wearing their uniforms to go home. In a previous debate, I mentioned having seen a nurse with a toddler in her arms leaning over a fruit and veg counter picking up produce. Was she going to work or coming home? Where had that uniform been worn, and what bacteria was on it? We need to limit visiting time, as we used to. There must not be free visiting, with anybody walking into hospitals whenever they want to. We should go back to restricted visiting so that a proper cleaning routine can be put into wards, people know who is going in and who is going out, and the number of bugs going into the ward is minimised. When I spoke to a previous Health Minister about this, particularly about laundering uniforms on site, she said, ““We just can’t do it—it’s too expensive.”” The Minister is gesticulating wildly at me as if to imply that uniforms are laundered on site, but they are not. Years ago, when I went to work as a nurse, I would go down to the basement, where my uniforms would be hanging up, choose my uniform, go and get changed and go on to the ward. Later on, I would go back down, dump my uniform in the dirty laundry bag, get changed and go home. It was as simple as that, but apparently it is unaffordable. Some £36 billion has been spent on an NHS computer system called Choose and Book, which was devised to give patients choice. I went into a GP’s practice to watch it working, and I will run hon. Members through the scenario. Patient comes in with inguinal hernia. GP clicks on the computer, which takes ages to get going. GP says to patient, ““Right, I can give you four choices of hospital, four dates, and four consultants—which would you like?”” Patient says, ““Which one would you choose, doctor?”” GP replies, ““I’d choose Bedford hospital, because your wife’s in her 70s and doesn’t drive, and she could get there by bus.”” Patient says, ““Okay, doctor, I’ll go to Bedford hospital.”” That cost £36 billion. I could have bought the argument that the system might be working elsewhere, but this week the headline on the front of Pulse, GPs’ in-house trade magazine, was: ““Exposed: referral system in disarray””. A Dr. Marchant talked about the serious distortion that exists in the system because of friction between the Government, with their patient choice agenda, primary care trusts and hospitals, who cannot agree between themselves on how it should be used. Billions of pounds have been wasted on a computer system that is not working, is being distorted, and is having hospitals taken out of it so that patients get no choice at all—and we have people dying of MRSA as it increases year on year.