Health: Hospital-acquired Infection

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness knows, we expect trusts and primary care organisations to utilise funds from within their global budgets to meet the requirements that I have just outlined, such as those in the NHS operating framework. These requirements are mandatory, and it appears that over the past few years, trusts and primary care organisations have really got to grips with this problem.

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, the Government are to be commended on insisting that all hospitals publish their infection rates for Clostridium difficile and MRSA on a weekly basis, which we can monitor on the website. It is interesting to note that one or two hospitals stand out by consistently having higher numbers while the rest make dramatic reductions. What is important, however, is that there has been no reduction in central venous line or other central line infections. I hope that the Government have a strategy similar to the one on MRSA and C. difficile to insist that hospitals reduce their rates of central line infections.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes an important point. We have consciously limited the extent to which it is a requirement to publish data to the most prevalent infections that need to be addressed. That is not to say that other types of infection are less important; they are extremely important. However, we would expect a ward-to-board policy to operate within each trust so that the boards of trusts bear down on these infections as hard as on others.