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Health Care-Associated Infections

No, I am not going to give way; I am moving on. Let me make it quite clear that bed occupancy rates are too high. In the past year, the Government have reduced the number of acute and general beds in the national health service by the largest proportion since 1982. We saw a reduction of 6,000 acute and general beds, which has taken us down to a figure of 127,000 such beds, when the NHS plan said that there would be a 2,000-bed increase to take us up to a figure of 135,000. There is a very big gap. Last year, The Independent said that the Department had conducted a review suggesting that reducing bed occupancy to a maximum of 85 per cent. would save 1,000 cases of MRSA a year. Apparently, according to speculation in the press, there are further factors that the Government know about, but which they have chosen not to publish. When the Secretary of State replies, perhaps he will tell us about some of those factors that the Department has found in its research. Let me make something clear about these three factors. They are interrelated, and they require the Government to support investment in isolation facilities, as well as the policy change on screening. Screening requires more isolation facilities. It is no good having screening for admissions if there are insufficient isolation facilities available to back it up. Isolation requires more single rooms, and therefore more beds. It is no good the Government going down the road that they propose, if they are cutting beds at the same time, and if nurses do not have time to clean beds before patients are admitted. Those three things go together, and the Government do not appear to understand the necessity for a comprehensive strategy. I shall just take a moment to talk specifically about Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. I find it astonishing that the Government's amendment does not mention the outbreak of C. difficile at Maidstone, or the report. It really should. The House will recall the appalling failings in the standard of care provided. They were probably, or definitely, the main cause of death of approximately 90 patients, and they may have contributed to the deaths of approximately 270 patients in the period up to September last year. The failings were many. Of course, some of the reporting concentrated on the failings of the nursing care, and they were severe, but we must be aware of the nurses' point of view. Given the intense pressures, very limited access to additional staffing—staffing numbers were going down—and bed occupancy rates of 90 per cent. or more, they find it hard to take the fact that they are held responsible for the poor professional standards when the management were putting them under intolerable pressure. The report discloses serious failings at every level: on antibiotic prescribing, which we were talking about; on lack of training; on the failure to establish an isolation ward for four months; and on simply admitting the scale of the problem. The public in west Kent were simply not told about the nature of what was going on.