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Health Care-Associated Infections

The hon. Gentleman is right; it is the director of nursing, who had a principal role in this, who has left. Three of the non-executive directors went immediately in November, and the other two are coming close to the end of their duty and will go at the end of this month. All non-executive directors will have gone by then. I shall not reiterate everything that I said in the House at the time of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells report. The trust's leadership has been completely changed. A new chair and chief executive have been appointed on an interim basis, and all the non-executive directors on the board have left or will be leaving very soon. I can tell the House that the overall situation on health care-associated infections has improved. C. difficile rates at Maidstone hospital have almost halved since 2006. During a recent visit to the hospital, I announced £350,000 of additional funding to enable the trust to carry out a deep clean this winter as part of a comprehensive cleaning programme. Earlier this month, I gave the trust clearance formally to appoint the company that will build a new £228 million hospital in the trust area at Pembury. The new hospital will have 512 en suite bedrooms and be the first 100 per cent. single-room facility in England, enabling much better isolation of patients with infections. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire referred in his contribution to the search and destroy programme in the Netherlands. The Dutch have always invested properly in health care, so they did not go through what we went through in the 1980s and 1990s. In the Netherlands, there is a much higher prevalence of single rooms for patients. All our new hospitals will be built with at least 50 per cent. single rooms and if we had the same rate of single occupancy as the Netherlands, we could adopt a search and destroy policy, too. We are building the first 100 per cent. single-room facility in England, which will, as I said, enable much better isolation of patients.