John McDonnell
Redwood Speaks out on Hospital Bugs
John Redwood spoke in House of Commons yesterday on the problems of disease being spread though our hospitals. His speech is in full below.
Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I rise to support the new clause moved by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) because it is desperately important to tackle the problem as strongly, vigorously and objectively as possible. As my hon. Friend pointed out, we have had seven years of initiatives-well-intentioned ones, I am sure-from Secretaries of State and Ministers in the Department of Health that have failed to deliver. Seven years on, and many circulars and directives later, we still have unacceptably high rates of infection in our hospitals. As we have heard, infection rates have risen dangerously in some hospitals over recent years, and there have often been no positive responses to the exhortations from the centre.
I support new clause 1 because I, like many right hon. and hon. Members, have constituents who have paid a high price for the failure of a local hospital to control infection. I recently received a letter from one of my constituents who went to the local district general hospital for an operation at the end of last year. My constituent was told that a full recovery from the wounds that the surgeon had to inflict was very likely and that their quality of life would be much improved after the operation had been successfully carried out. Seven months later, my constituent is in more pain than that experienced before going to hospital to get the original problem sorted out. My constituent contracted a dangerous infection in the wound as a result of the hospital operation, and had to be readmitted twice so that the wound could be reopened and cleansed under hospital conditions. On each occasion, the process was not only painful but failed to overcome the obstinate infection that had got into the wound, presumably when the original operation was performed. My constituent had to spend a couple of months on antibiotics, but that has still not solved the problem.
In a macabre way, I suppose that my constituent was lucky because they did not die-we know that all too many hundreds of people die as a result of severe infections contracted in hospital by one means or another. This Government are all too ready to tackle the problems of death and serious injury on the roads, when perhaps as many as one in eight of all accidents are caused partly or wholly by speed. The Government are always dramatic in their moves to try to control speed on the roads, yet far more people die in our hospitals as a result of mistakes and infections contracted in our hospitals, where there is not the same sense of urgency.
One of my objections to the way the Government legislate and respond is that if the problem lies in the private sector, the answer is regulation and legislation, often with criminal charges, penalties and prosecutions attached, but if the problem is in the public sector, the answer is exhortation and another quango, and not the same sense of urgency or seriousness. I see the Minister objecting, but she must see the justice of what I am saying. My constituents are very angry that there is still so much infection and danger in our hospitals.
Of course, elective surgery has always been a risky process. It entails first wounding the patient in order to bring about a much better life for them in due course. It is worth taking the risk of having the skin and muscle cut through if the surgeon is skilful, as they often are, and if, as a result of surgery, a part of the body that will not work properly can be removed or a part of the body can be repaired. There are many fine things done by many brilliant surgeons around the country and many of us are grateful for their work. We hope we will not need it, but we will be very grateful should we need it ourselves.
If the risk of a serious infection while the process is under way becomes too great, the entire question of what we are doing in hospitals is opened up with an entirely different balance of risk. If someone is told that they will probably have a substantial improvement in their quality of life if a non-threatening condition is tackled, they will say, "Well, I don't mind the pain for a few weeks from a flesh wound that will repair." But if they are told, "By the way, there is a danger that while you are going through that process, you could contract something that could mean that you were in permanent pain or that was even life-threatening in itself," that will lead people to ask, "Is that really what I want? Is this what we should be doing?"
I agree with the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow) that one of the issues that need to be tackled in the new clause and in the Bill is bed utilisation. Bed utilisation in the Royal Berkshire hospital in Reading, my local district general, is undoubtedly too high. I am someone who likes to use public money wisely and usually I favour great productivity, but there are limits. There must be enough time between one user of a hospital bed and another to ensure thorough cleaning and preparation of the bed and the ward or the room, so that the new patient is not likely to be at risk as a result of over-utilisation of the bed and perhaps some rushing of the procedures that should be undertaken to prepare the bed and the area for the new patient.
I quite understand how managers and senior doctors in hospitals, faced day after day with the terrible problem that there are not enough beds and there are people in the corridors, people queuing and people needing treatment, say, "Let's just clear the bed and get on with it," but we must take some of the strain off them by offering enough beds in our hospitals and enough facilities so that we can have a more civilised regime, so that there are not queues at the doors and so that there is adequate time between patients to make sure that all the right procedures are followed.
As my hon. Friend said, the Secretary of State intruded into the debate in recent days, without the courtesy of a statement to the House of Commons, to say that he would be hands-on and that he would solve the problem of cleanliness in hospitals. I do not think that that will work. I do not believe it is possible for any man or woman, however talented and energetic, to be personally responsible for the cleanliness of every hospital and every surgery throughout the country, or simply by the magnetism or lack of magnetism of their personality to ensure that every one of the million-plus staff follows all the right procedures all the time to guarantee that conditions are clean enough.
It may be, as my hon. Friend said, that the Secretary of State was going hands-on by way of washing his hands of responsibility. We certainly hope he will wash his hands thoroughly before taking responsibility and before intruding in this sensitive area. He seems to think that hand-washing is one of the most important routines that has not been properly observed in recent years.
I will support my hon. Friend, as the new clause is a valiant attempt to bring about improvement and change in an important area. I hope the Minister understands how desperately important that is to many constituents contemplating operations or who have recently had operations, who want the reassurance from someone within such a mighty organisation that everything is being done to get on top of the problem and, more importantly, that infection rates are falling rapidly and not continuing to rise, as they have done in many places in recent years. Patients and constituents expect no less. They expect clean hospitals but, above all, they expect to have hospitals in which infection control is taken seriously and successfully implemented. It cannot be beyond the NHS, with all the money now at its disposal and all the people whom the Government say they are now recruiting, to control infection better. We owe it to our constituents, and I hope that the Minister will accept my hon. Friend's new clause in that spirit.
Mr. Redwood: Given that the most serious threat occurs in situations such as the one that I described, where the infection took place in the operating theatre when the wound was open, how will those procedures help cleanliness in operating theatres, where nurses and surgeons work, or in the preparation of patients before operations?
Miss Johnson: It depends. All of us sympathise with any patient who experiences the same difficulties as the right hon. Gentleman's constituent. The risk depends on the procedures and the type of surgery. If one undergoes surgery to the stomach or gut, the risk of acquiring an infection is substantially greater than that in orthopaedics, where special provisions are made tightly to control infection and where those parts of the body are not directly involved. Different parts of hospitals clearly face different issues, and it would be wrong to make a blanket statement.
