Hand Hygiene: NHS

Debate between Alan Meale and Nigel Mills

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered hand hygiene in the NHS.

I am grateful for the chance to raise these concerns. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. I secured this debate to highlight some important issues. The germs that cause infections are spread to patients primarily on the hands of healthcare workers, so cleaning hands is the No. 1 way of reducing the spread of infection. Guidelines and rules are already in place, but they are not followed closely enough and the inspection regimes do not do their job and do not produce meaningful data about hand hygiene compliance levels. This serious issue has a dramatic effect on the health of many thousands of patients a year. For many of them, it could be avoided. There is a way of dramatically improving this issue for patients.

The data on this issue are scary. The 2011 prevalence survey showed that 6.4% of hospital patients—one in every 16—contracted an infection while in hospital. Imagine going to a restaurant where one in 16 customers was made ill by the food. No one would go back again; we would not allow it to stay open. But that is what the data showed for our hospitals five years ago. We should not be willing to accept that.

Infections contracted in hospitals affect 300,000 patients every year and cause 5,000 deaths. They have a dramatic impact on those individuals and a significant impact on the NHS, because patients who contract such infections remain in hospital on average two and a half times longer than patients who do not. They spend an average of 11, and a maximum of 25, extra days in hospital at an estimated cost of about £1 billion a year. It is estimated that 30% of such infections can be avoided simply by better applying the existing rules and practices.

The NHS must improve its performance on this fundamental issue. We should not be willing to accept that level of unnecessary infection. I am not saying that such infections are caused by people deliberately not washing their hands enough. They probably do not realise what they are doing, and their behaviour is not corrected. I suspect that most people in the NHS do not realise how many times they should wash their hands when they see a patient and do not know that they are not doing all they can. I am sure most people are extremely keen to do everything they can to fix this problem and prevent such infections. We must look at what more we can do to put systems in place and enforce them. We should give people support, training, peer pressure and peer reviews to ensure it is happening, rather than blame individuals. This issue will become increasingly important as the problem of antimicrobial resistance grows. We cannot rely on antibiotics to fix such infections and tackle the problem, so it is important that we stop the infections in the first place and prevent the situation from getting worse.

I want to talk about the existing hand-washing rules, the systems for monitoring them and why they do not work. I will look at some things that can be done to improve the situation. I hope the Minister will accept that I do not intend these ideas to be controversial or costly; they are ways of enforcing the rules that are already in place and of using the existing systems.

There is a generally accepted international standard for the number of hand-washing moments when nurses and doctors treat patients. It is not controversial; all nurses and doctors are taught it as part of their training. It is an accepted standard in the NHS and most hospitals around the world. I am not asking for a super gold standard for the UK. I do not want to create anything new, different or complicated. That set of moments when hand-washing is needed is accepted by everybody; it is just a question of how many of them are acted upon.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence put in place rules for hospitals to assess compliance with that number of hand-washing moments, so we do not need a new framework or a new duty on hospitals. Hospitals already have a duty to assess how well their staff comply with the rules for the five hand-washing moments when they deal with patients. When the Care Quality Commission audits hospitals, it checks how well those rules are enforced, so the systems are there but they are not working and we are not getting the outcomes we ought to have.

One of the problems is that hospitals check the compliance of their staff mainly through observations carried out by a member of staff on the ward or a member of the team. Normally, a nurse who happens to have half an hour spare one day is asked to review how well her colleagues are performing the five hand-washing moments. If I am doing a job and someone tells me, “Right, today you’re being observed on these criteria,” my performance goes up a bit because I know I am being observed and I do everything I can to comply—far in excess of my normal behaviour.

Another issue is that the staff members conducting the review are not trained in how to do it. They may not be entirely familiar with how many hand-washing moments there are or how many arise in the care of patients, so there is a combination of effects. If the people reviewing their colleagues, perhaps their friends, have not been trained to do so—they are not specialists—and are not fully familiar with the rules, it is not surprising that we do not end up with the most reliable data.

The vast majority of the observations show that the nurses and doctors observed are somewhere in the high 90s for compliance, which means they clean their hands more than 96% of the time, as they are meant to. The problem is that independent assessments carried out by people in a more reliable way suggest that compliance is significantly lower. Those data suggest that the actual compliance levels are somewhere between 18% and 40%. There is a set of rules and a system for checking compliance, but it is producing a dramatic false positive. It suggests that we are in the very high 90s for compliance, when we are nearer 20% compliant. It overstates the results by a factor of nearly five, with the terrible effect that there are more infections than there need to be and patients are suffering.

The NHS and other international health bodies accept that the levels of compliance with the hand-washing rules in the high 90s cannot possibly be right. Everybody knows they are false positives, but they give excessive reassurance to the boards of trusts that their staff are compliant, so further action is not taken. Everybody accepts that there has been progress in recent years in tackling infections, which have been reduced from even higher levels. The measures that were adopted to tackle infections had an effect on clostridium difficile and MRSA, but the problem is that we do not track instances of other infections, so it is hard to get data on how many are being tackled.

There have been various studies to try to assess levels of hand hygiene compliance to see what can be done to improve it. I am grateful to the Deb Group, one of the large employers in my constituency, which has an interest in this issue because it makes hand hygiene gel. It has some innovative ideas about how we can monitor hand hygiene compliance. I am grateful for the information it gave me for this debate. I should be clear that I am not advocating any one solution or product; we need a greater recognition in the NHS that this is an issue, and that there are better ways of assessing compliance. We need to encourage greater compliance.

As for recognition of the issue, Sir Mike Richards, the chief inspector of hospitals at the CQC, has highlighted the inaccuracy of local hand hygiene audits, so one would think that action is required. If we recognise that hand hygiene is important and if we recognise that we are nowhere near as compliant as we ought to be, one would think that many hospital trusts would be taking action to try to improve the situation. Sadly, that is not the case. Trusts have a lot on their plates and there are many issues, financial and others, to deal with, so they may decide that an area with compliance levels in the high 90s is not a stone that they want to turn over. They may fear that some proper audits might lead to the discovery that they are only 25% compliant and thus incur some unnecessary wrath.

However, the experience is that hospitals that take the matter seriously do get positive feedback. The CQC report on Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which was in special measures until last year and is not too far from my constituency, highlights its use of a method to count the number of hand hygiene moments and the number of times ward staff were complying with the rules. It received some positive feedback in the letter from the chief inspector of hospitals in the report, which states that the hospital was using

“innovative practice to increase hand hygiene, using the latest technology monitoring the use of alcohol in sanitising gel.”

They were not marked down for having discovered an issue; they were complimented. The report states:

“We saw innovation in practice on ward 11 (male surgical ward) where the infection control nurses had worked with staff to reduce infection control risks and increase hand hygiene. The team implemented technology which counted the use of alcohol sanitising gel and compared it against the target of how often it should be used. This was in response to hand hygiene audits which needed improvement.”

On action that the trust must take to improve, the report states:

“The trust must ensure that ward assurance targets, such as hand hygiene practice and recording of patient observations, is achieved at a consistent level in the emergency department.”

We can see from that that if hospitals take the matter seriously, recognise that they are not as compliant as they ought to be and take action, that helps them in these audits.

The big ask here is what more we can do to ensure that CQC reviews identify that hospitals are perhaps fooling themselves into thinking that they are compliant when they are not. Perhaps asking, “Are you really doing accurate and competent monitoring of whether your staff are complying with the hand hygiene rules? Do you have any independent assurance that that data is accurate or are you just relying on surveys done in an idle half an hour by a member of staff who is not really trained, which can produce false positives?” should be a regular feature of all inspections. Work done over a long period to improve levels of hand hygiene compliance in hospitals has produced data showing that when hospitals improve performance and increase the number of hand hygiene moments, infections decrease at a pretty similar rate to the increase in hand hygiene moments. Data exists in the public domain that shows that that is not just a coincidence. If a hospital can increase compliance, infection rates can come down, improving outcomes for patients and reducing costs to the NHS.

My suggestion is not particularly complicated or expensive. It would not lead to the creation of new rules or new burdens that people have not been trained for. I am simply asking that hospital trusts around the country comply with the rules that are already there and monitor whether their staff are complying with the standards that they have been trained in. The NICE guidelines could be tightened up so that hospitals must not only monitor whether staff are compliant, but do so in a competent, independent and impartial manner and not rely on the occasional untrained observation by members of the same team.

When the CQC goes around hospitals assessing cleanliness and patient safety, we should expect it to check whether competent work has been done. If it has not, it should encourage and instruct hospitals to take the matter seriously. When hospitals show higher than average instances of infections, it should check that they took this issue seriously and that the relatively simple and low-cost measures that can be taken to reduce infection were applied. When hospitals are not doing that, it should be regarded as a serious issue.

There are many things in health that we cannot control or fix or that are incredibly expensive, but what we have here is a set of rules that already exist. It is a simple thing that most people are trained in. By doing everything that we can to comply with it, we could save a lot of money and a lot of patient suffering. There is the potential for real improvement. I hope the Minister will accept that this is a serious situation, and that there is more that NICE and the CQC can do and more that hospital trusts can be expected to do, so that the prevalence of infections in the next report is at the lowest possible level.

[Sir Alan Meale (in the Chair)]

As the debate is only an hour long and we have three quarters of an hour remaining, I want to inform Members that I intend to call Back Benchers first, then the Front-Bench Spokespeople and then the Minister. I will call the Back Benchers who stand.