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Health Care-Associated Infections

That must be right. We need to get right back to the sorts of situations that the Minister described to me, with meticulous attention paid to hygiene whether it relates to pillows or syringes, let alone telling a patient to ““go in the bed””, which, as she will be aware, is what happened at Maidstone. I would like something terribly simple: an air of carbolic, as I described it to the Minister. I had some sympathy for the hon. Member for Livingston when he described the situation that used to prevail in hospitals, whereby one was immediately hit in the nostrils by the scents of disinfectant, carbolic, floor scrub and every other horror. Now, even hand-washing is a forgotten discipline. It would be helpful if very basic hygiene practices were restored. As a slight digression, I also think that we need to look at the NHS as a whole and ask whether what we have is going to last us to the end of the 21st century or whether we need to carry out some serious restructuring. That does not mean the sort of piecemeal restructuring going on at the moment, which is afflicting my trust, where in order to have a trauma specialism at one hospital—I have nothing against such a specialism—people going in under accident and emergency procedures have to travel 17 miles on B roads before they may be attended to. Nor do we want, as also proposed under the reconfiguration, those using maternity services to have to travel down to Tunbridge Wells, so that anyone whose labour runs into difficulty at Maidstone will be taken there along 17 miles of B road. Tunbridge Wells is a splendid place, but no one wants to travel 17 miles by B road when they are in severe orthopaedic trauma, or in a complicated labour. Therefore, those sorts of reconfiguration are not the answer. We need to consider the financing of the NHS, and whether those who can do so should be encouraged to take some of the costs on themselves. We need to face the fact that the state cannot do everything—it does not. What, after all, would the hon. Member for Livingston say to those who were told to go blind in one eye before the other could be dealt with? The state cannot do everything, and it is time that it stopped pretending that it can. By pretending, it is running a three-tier NHS. At the top are those who get their NHS treatment or who choose to go private; at the next stage are those who cannot get their NHS treatment and can go private but do not want to do so; and at the third stage are those who do not get their NHS treatment, and could not go private if they starved themselves for a month. If we do not look at the whole picture of the NHS, we betray the most vulnerable in the population.