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NHS Resources

I am extremely grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s help. We constantly work with the NHS Institute to improve and expand those indicators, and to help local NHS organisations improve productivity and the quality of the care that they commission and provide. The hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to focus on the centrality and importance of quality. I am sure that even if he noticed nothing else about our health policy in the past year, he will have noticed the major next stage review by my noble Friend Lord Darzi, "Our NHS, our future". The overriding principle of the review was that we have to shift the service from one that is about capacity, which was right 12 years ago when we suffered from serious undercapacity in the service, to one that is about quality. In most walks of life, we probably think of quality as something that is a bit pricey, a bit expensive—one pays a bit more for quality—but that is not the case in health systems. Quality is cheap, for all the reasons that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) mentioned. They gave examples such as prevention, doing more to tackle health care associated infections, and so on. We know from the clinical advice that we get that hospitals that are run well and efficiently and that provide high-quality care also tend to have a better handle on their finances. That is no accident. We could talk at length about the experience at the Mid Staffordshire NHS trust, and I will come to the point that the hon. Member for Wyre Forest made about it in a minute, but there is a strong correlation in hospitals between having a good handle on financial management, and high-quality care. The two are not mutually exclusive, as some people have tried to imply in the coverage of the terrible events in Mid Staffordshire—they usually go together. So, yes to more prevention and yes to more tackling of health care associated infections. As I am sure the hon. Members for Wyre Forest and for Castle Point both know, the NHS will from April have pre-screening for MRSA for all out-patients and all elective surgery in hospitals. We believe that, too, will help to reduce bills and improve the quality of health care. Venous thromboembolism has been raised with me before, and I will write to the hon. Member for Wyre Forest in detail on it. I recollect that there was a discussion with the Healthcare Commission as to whether it should be included as a stand-alone priority in the next—now the current—operating framework for the NHS, but it was decided that it would be better to include it in the existing performance standard on mortality than to burden the service, PCTs and trusts with ever more targets and priorities, given the pressure that is constantly on them. However, the Care Quality Commission is consulting on the issue and we are waiting to hear what it thinks we should do to ensure that the important points that the hon. Gentleman made about tackling venous thromboembolism are taken seriously by the service to achieve the efficiencies and savings that he would like.