Christmas Adjournment

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support; that is fantastic. I do not know whether hon. Members saw a newspaper article yesterday referring to a possible solution to the problem that I mentioned a second ago—that doctors should not wear ties. That is a gimmick. It is easy to say, ““Don’t wear ties to work, doctor, because you’ve got MRSA on your tie.”” That takes no cost and no effort. Telling doctors not to wear their ties to work is a complete and utter gimmick. We do not need gimmicks. We need the Government to look at where the money is being ploughed into the NHS. I know what patients would prefer—they would prefer to come out of hospital alive. My constituent would rather have her mother nursed in hospital. People would like to know that when they go into hospital, they are not putting themselves at greater risk. They want that much more than they want a computer system that does not really give them any choice whatever. I should like to talk about something else in connection with MRSA, which I discovered just today: the bacteria pass as freely on the air as by touch. Even as a nurse, I thought that they were transferred only by touch, but they are also airborne. Apparently, as many of the bacteria are transferred in the air as from hand to hand. I do not know what the figures are, but I would imagine that it would cost nowhere near £36 billion to fit every hospital in the country with an air filtration system. We have air filtration systems in operating theatres where we do orthopaedic operations. The bacteria are taken out of the air there, so why can we not have filtration systems all over hospitals? There are a lot of people who would have liked to have their loved ones at home this Christmas but cannot. I, too, have lost someone from MRSA, who went into hospital with a minor heart attack just before Christmas last year and did not come out, and I have two constituents who have lost limbs. This is carnage, and it cannot carry on. This is a debacle. People must go into hospital to be made better, not worse. I know that that is a sour note to end on, but I should still like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas.