Hospitals: Infectious Diseases

(asked on 25th February 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the study in the British Medical Journal by Julian Guest Modelling the annual NHS costs and outcomes attributable to healthcare-associated infections in England, published on 22 January, what action, if any, they propose to take in response to the estimated 7.1 million bed days in NHS hospitals in England that were occupied by patients with a health-associated infection in 2016–17.


Answered by
Lord Bethell Portrait
Lord Bethell
This question was answered on 10th March 2020

A survey undertaken in 2016/17 by the European Centre for Disease Control to detect the number of healthcare associated infections (HCAIs), estimated the number in England to be much lower than those in this report at approximately 206,000. Public Health England is developing robust methodologies that will enable greater certainty in estimates of the numbers and costs of HCAIs.

While there have been year-on-year reductions in MRSA and C. difficile; E. coli, MSSA, Klebsiella and Pseudomonas infections have increased. From April 2020, the NHS will introduce an annual national reduction target for these bloodstream infections.

NHS England and NHS Improvement take a systematic approach to the prevention of infections with a sustained focus at national level. Action on HCAIs forms part of wide- ranging commitments made in the NHS Long Term Plan for preventing ill health among the National Health Service workforce.

The United Kingdom’s national action plan on antimicrobial resistance has a strong focus on infection prevention and control and includes the commitment to support research that will help target front line interventions.

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