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Health Care-Associated Infections

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone). His powerful speech went to the heart of an important problem, and I hope that the Minister will take it further into account. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe): the overwhelming mood in west Kent is that we must move on and rebuild confidence in our local NHS having learned the lessons. If we are to do that, we must not ignore lessons that are still to be learned from the report. Discussion about the headline measures to tackle infection control has continued, but in the brief time available to me I want to mention four contributions that we must continue to take into account in the weeks and months ahead. First, if any possible good could come out of the report, it is that it has concentrated Ministers' minds on the need for a new hospital to serve the people of west Kent. The two hospitals in my constituency, the Kent and Sussex and the Pembury, must be two of the most decrepit in the country. Pembury hospital is a converted workhouse. The buildings that are not part of the workhouse are wooden huts. It is impossible to imagine patients and staff of a hospital elsewhere in the country suffering from such conditions in the 21st century. I welcome my right hon. Friend's support, and I hope that the sad opportunity that this report has given us to press the case for a new hospital will ensure that it is delivered after decades of waiting. Secondly, we need to go beyond the initial response on infection control and implement a zero-tolerance approach to hospital-acquired infections such as C. difficile. The national target of a 30 per cent. cut is fine as far as it goes, but we need to rebuild confidence to match the confidence that people on the continent and people using the private sector have in their hospitals. They fully expect to come out of hospital without having acquired an infection. Greater urgency is required. The excellent matron of Kent and Sussex hospital, Linda Summerfield, took me on a tour of the wards recently. They were spotless and their cleanliness could not be faulted; nevertheless we saw physically inadequate facilities. In an intervention earlier, I mentioned the lack of changing facilities. The Royal College of Nursing is clear: every nurse should be able to travel to work in their own clothes and change on site into a uniform that is laundered on site and guaranteed to be free of infection. That is impossible at Kent and Sussex hospital, because the changing facilities have space for only a dozen people at a time, in a trust that employs many hundreds. There is an urgent need to address such facilities. Curtains are another factor. It is imperative that hospitals have disposable curtains, rather than tatty old curtains that attract the spores that contribute to C. difficile. When I put that point to the trust's chief executive, he told me that there were plans to replace the curtains over time, but that is not good enough. The situation is urgent, so if it is clear that disposable curtains will make a difference they should be used throughout the entire trust immediately. I am concerned about the lack of progress on that issue. We need to consider the adequacy of the management team that replaced the previous, inadequate team. We have a new, interim chief executive and I have no personal complaints about his authority or capability to manage the trust, but I am concerned about the fact that he is only part-time. He is also the chief executive of the Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Trust in Surrey. The headline on the press release announcing his appointment was ““Glenn Douglas to split time equally between two organisations””. A trust needing as much care and attention as ours requires a full-time chief executive. Of course, we require a skilled individual and I should be delighted if Mr. Douglas, with his skills, was appointed full-time as interim chief executive. He may be spending too little time at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells although, to be fair, I do not think that is the case. However, we cannot engage in a smoke and mirrors exercise and pretend to people in Surrey that they have the full-time attention of their chief executive, given that hospital-acquired infections in his home trust increased by 88 per cent. over the past year. If there is one lesson we should learn from this whole episode it is that we cannot keep the public in the dark with nudges and winks about what is going on in the NHS. If the man is supposed to be running two trusts we need to know about it, and people in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells need the same clear message as people in Surrey. Finally, as we reflect on the grossly inadequate supervision given by the failed management of the trust over the past few years, we can see that there is a general problem of accountability. I would be hard-pushed to say to whom any of the NHS institutions in my area—the strategic health authority, the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust or the West Kent PCT—are accountable. If I ask questions of the Health Secretary about local issues he will say it is a matter for the local trusts, but I have no direct means of holding them to account, other than, occasionally, to embarrass them publicly, which is a crude mechanism. I hope that we will reflect on the lessons and design in the appointment of new non-executive directors, not just in our own trusts, but more widely across the NHS, a more genuine means to hold NHS managers to account. We should make it clear to non-executive chairmen that they have a duty to the public. That applies to George Jenkins, the interim chairman of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells trust, and every non-executive chairman of NHS bodies throughout the country. Their role is not always and everywhere to defend management. In the absence of anyone else—although that absence is a fault of the system—their responsibility is to represent our constituents and take management to task when necessary. The Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells non-executive directors and chairman failed abjectly in that responsibility. I look to the new chairman of our trust, and the new non-executive directors to be appointed, to exercise that role.