Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Burrowes and Anne Milton

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Anne Milton]

I can assure the hon. Lady that I am not at all worried about the politics of the issue. To ensure a brief answer, I refer her to the Government’s alcohol strategy, which mentions all those factors and draws attention to the substantial progress we expect to see on those figures.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s commitment to supporting GP screening for alcohol misuse, but given that less than a third of GPs use an alcohol screening questionnaire, and of those a third use them for an average of only 33 patients a year, how can the reformed national health service incentivise those GPs to ensure that they support early intervention and minimise alcohol harm?

[Anne Milton]

We will introduce an alcohol check within the NHS checks for adults from April 2013. My hon. Friend is right to highlight the substantial impact that identification and brief interventions in the GP’s surgery and elsewhere can have.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Burrowes and Anne Milton

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

14. What progress he has made in reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)]

As the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), has just said, clarity and vision are what is needed. The coalition agreement made it clear that the NHS should adopt a zero tolerance approach to all avoidable health care-associated infections, which have caused so many problems for the public over so many years. In 2010-11, there were just under 1,500 MRSA bloodstream infections. That is a decrease of 22% on the previous year. That means that infections are at their lowest level since mandatory surveillance was introduced. In the same period, there were just under 22,000 occurrences of C. difficile infections, which is a 15% decrease compared to the previous year. We will continue with our zero tolerance approach.

[Mr Burrowes]

I thank the Minister for that reply and the rapid progress made under this Government. I welcome the new C. difficile objective and the publication of weekly statistics, but does the Minister share my concern that it is the same hospitals that keep appearing with the highest number of C. diff cases? What is her Department doing to help those hospitals reduce such cases?

[Anne Milton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Under the previous Administration there was a national target of reducing C. difficile infections by 30% by 2011, but that does not address the problem because, as he rightly says, there are hospitals that consistently had high rates of infections, so we changed that. Since April, every PCT and every acute trust has its own objective. The organisations with the highest rates of infection will have more ambitious objectives than those that are doing well.