Health and Social Care Bill

I was quoting from an editorial in the Lancet: "““Brown also plans to double the number of hospital matrons to check on ward cleaning and accost doctors wearing long sleeves. They would be better employed making sure doctors, nurses and visitors washed their hands properly, the proven way to stop hospital-acquired infections””." Dr Stephanie Dancer, an expert in microbiology, warned last year that deep cleaning would have only a very short-term impact. She was right. The Countess of Chester Hospital, which spent £300,000 on a deep clean, suffered a C. difficile outbreak four days later, when 26 people became infected. In fact, when he made the announcement last year, the Prime Minister promised that deep cleaning would be repeated at least every 18 months, but we now know from Written Answers that there are no plans to repeat the first deep clean exercise and no plans to assess how effective the first deep clean actually was. No one should think that deep cleaning of itself will make more than a tiny dent in the statistics. In January, the Prime Minister went on the ““Andrew Marr Show”” and made a promise that is bound to have impressed a lot of people. He said: "““If you go to hospital, you will get screened by next year for MRSA or C difficile””." No one from the Government sought to correct that story, but two days later the Health Secretary’s infection control strategy reported on C. difficile and said this: "““Screening for colonised patients is inappropriate. (Most potential cases would not be identified …)””." The promise of screening for C. difficile, which is not going to happen, was yet another example of Ministers giving false hope to the public by leading them to believe that the hazards of healthcare-acquired infections could be tackled effectively in a particular way when in fact they cannot be. The Government clearly think that one of the first tasks for the new commission will be to address the problem of healthcare-associated infections. If they did not think that, we would not have Clause 17 in the Bill, and nor would the advertisement for the chair of the new commission have been worded as it was. It must make sense to have a statutory reporting procedure whereby patients and the public are automatically alerted to concerns flagged up by the commission on these issues. I hope that the Minister will take this idea away and consider it seriously.