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Health Care-Associated Infections

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith), who made a powerful and well argued point about an issue that I had not appreciated before. However, I would argue that it is not a question of having one or the other; we need to save lives in respect of both. I shall speak mainly about C. difficile, as the hospital that most of my constituents have to attend has the worst rate of C. difficile in the country. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) in his place, as I am talking about Kettering hospital. I know that my hon. Friend pays a great deal of attention to this matter. The likelihood of someone getting C. difficile in Kettering hospital is three times the national average. I hope to make constructive points tonight, as I refer to a particular constituency case, but there must be some reason why Kettering hospital has such a high rate. One thing that we know about our primary care trust is that it is the worst funded in the country. The national capitation formula shows that, this year, our PCT is £38 million underfunded, as it has been for every one of the last four years—so we are talking about substantially more than £140 million. We know another important factor, which is that the hospital is very efficient, but that the capacity is never there. A bed is emptied and another patient goes in. We thus have underfunding, high capacity and the top rate for C. difficile. I do not want to make a party political point, but there does seem to be some correlation between the three. I do not believe that we could have the worst funded area, a highly efficient hospital and the highest rate of C. difficile without there being any sort of correlation. I want to pay tribute to the staff of the NHS, particularly in my area. The doctors, nurses and ancillary staff are superb. They helped save my wife's life and I spent a lot of time in local hospitals seeing what happened. On the capacity problem, I recall my wife having a major cancer operation. She was lying in a hospital bed with drains; she had just come back from the theatre. The ward was full of course, and they cleaned it while she was there. They started to clean the bed and above it, and they sprinkled dust all over her, because they had no other opportunity to clean the ward. Lack of capacity is one of the problems we face. If there was more capacity in hospitals, and fewer targets, the situation would improve. I know that the chief executive of Kettering hospital is working very hard to improve the situation there, and I understand that the latest figures show an improvement; I think we are now the fourth worst in the country, so we are going in the right direction.