Health and Social Care Bill

I shall speak to my Amendment No. 110. Its purpose is straightforward: it is to oblige the commission to publish information specifically related to breaches of the regulations about healthcare-associated infections. Clause 85 already contains a regulation-making power to require the CQC to publish certain categories of information. These include the conviction of any person in respect of an offence committed under Part 1 of the Bill, the cancellation of a person’s registration, the variation of a condition in relation to a person’s registration and the payment by any person of a penalty pursuant to a notice issued under Clause 82. In other words, when someone does something bad that patients and others need to know about, the commission will have a duty to make the facts public. Why should healthcare-associated infections be placed in the same category? There is a simple answer: the incidence and prevalence of healthcare-associated infections are factors that influence consumer choice, as they rightly should, in relation to hospitals and to care homes. To deny consumers and patients that information is simply wrong. Almost three times as many people are killed by hospital infections as are killed on the roads each year. The number of people killed by both MRSA and C. difficile in England and Wales has increased by nearly six times since 1997, with C. difficile responsible for the majority of those deaths. In fact, there has been a 50-fold increase in C. difficile infections since 1990. By any standards, healthcare-associated infections are a serious problem in our health service. There have been endless false dawns and reheated announcements from Ministers. We have known for years that one of the main weapons for dealing with healthcare-associated infections is to isolate patients who are infected, so, in Winning Ways in 2003, the Department of Health promised the appropriate provision of isolation facilities. In 2004 John Reid assured us that new hospitals being built had more isolation rooms than ever before. In 2007 the current Secretary of State promised new clinical guidance to increase the use of isolation for those patients who are infected with MRSA or C. difficile. For the majority of trusts, that will mean greater use of single rooms. But then what do we find? The Health Protection Agency recently reported as follows: "““Three quarters of trusts indicated that they had problems implementing isolation policies due to inadequacies in the number and fitness for purpose of isolation rooms””." That was in the November 2007 National Confidential Study of Deaths Following MRSA Infection. Therefore, although clearly an effective measure, isolation is not, after all, happening in the majority of cases. Then we have had the deep-clean initiative. There is absolutely no evidence that the deep cleaning of hospitals is a cost-effective use of funds. To be brutal, it is a populist gimmick. An editorial in the Lancet last September said that, "““politicians must stop pandering to populism about hospital cleanliness and listen to the evidence””." [The Sitting was suspended for a Division in the House from 7.25 to 7.35 pm.]