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Health Care-Associated Infections

That is extremely important. The code of practice, which we debated in the House a year ago, and which Ministers said would solve those problems, specifies in terms that there must be openness and information to the public about infection rates. It is quite astonishing that in a press release the management of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust tried claim that infections had been brought in from the community. Only a small proportion of infections were acquired that way, so it was an outrageous claim. Astonishingly, senior managers—the director of nursing and the chief executive—at one point denied to the Healthcare Commission that it was the trust's policy not to cohort patients for nursing. Contrary to the guidelines, that was exactly what was being done, but they did not seem to realise that, so management failings were extraordinary. In the light of its findings earlier this year, the Healthcare Commission knew that there were significant failings in the management of the trust—but it was not until the publication of the report that the chairman and the chief executive resigned. More recently, non-executive directors and the former director of nursing have resigned. No one who saw the commission's report when it was presented to the Department of Health in May could have come to any conclusion other than that the failings in the trust's management and leadership were so great that they needed to be replaced. The Secretary of State says that he was not asked to replace the management by the Healthcare Commission, so he did not do so. He hides behind the commission. He has instituted an independent leadership review, even though it will not serve any purpose, because the leadership has failed and its members are disappearing. One of them took a large severance payment, which the Secretary of State claims that he can stop—I doubt that he can—and the leadership is not in place in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells to follow up the report and demonstrate to the public's satisfaction that there is new leadership in place. It will take far too long for that leadership to be put in place, but it should have been put in place in May, when the findings were first presented to the Department.