| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Simmonds: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Andrew Mackinlay: I am afraid that I will not. The hon. Gentleman will share my frustration that the speeches of the Tory and Labour Front-Bench spokesmen lasted until eight minutes past six. This is supposed to be a debate, which means that we should all have a go, so if he will forgive me, I will not give way to him.
Fair comparisons cannot be made between the situation now and in the past. There has been too much partisan politics this afternoon. In The Independent on 8 March 1997, Anthony Bevins and Paul Routledge reported:
"John Horam, Health Minister said in a Commons reply that the total numbers of cases of . . . MRSA . . . was not 'collected centrally', and the ministry had no idea of the number of cases in which the bug 'contributed to or caused death'."
That was part of the problem, but officials running the NHS were also to blame. Ultimately, of course, Ministers must take the blame. As recently as February 2000, Sir Alan Langlands, former chief executive of the NHS and part of the magic circle that runs the country, whether under a Labour or a Tory Government, was asked whether hospitals would be given targets for curbing infections. He said:
"I don't think I want to pin myself to a target at the moment, simply because we need to have a proper surveillance system that gives us baseline numbers against which we can set targets."
Sir Alan did not recognise the extent of the problem. Like many others, he did not want to admit the scale of the issue. He adopted a laid-back approach.
The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said that I had raised the subject on a number of occasions in the House, and I am grateful to him for acknowledging that. However, he also blamed Labour for not pressing harder on the issue when in opposition. I was a member of that Opposition. I was not a Front Bencher—I never will be, thank God—but I was one of a number of Members who raised the issue. I double-checked my figures, and at least five peers raised it in the other place before 1997, including my colleague Lord Fitt of Belfast, whose moving speech I commend to hon. Members. I believe that Baroness Cumberlege replied to him, and she was working from the same brief that the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam) used in his reply to my Adjournment debate. The thrust of their argument was that we were exaggerating the scale of the problem. We were Back Benchers, so they did not have to take any notice of us. They kept their heads down and spoke from their brief in the belief that there was nothing to worry about.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) also secured a debate on the issue, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman).
2 Mar 2005 : Column 1064
In fact, about 15 Back Benchers raised the issue in the closing stages of the last Tory Government, but it was ignored. We therefore depended very much on voluntary reporting. The Whip has raised his finger, but I wish to make one more point.
In his reply to my Adjournment debate, the hon. Member for Orpington said:
"Mostly, the type of infection will be trivial, but for patients who are in hospital, it can sometimes be serious, as the hon. Gentleman has noted . . . The infections are no worse than those caused by the ordinary bacterium."—[Official Report, 19 March 1997; Vol. 292, c. 859.]
He counselled me that it was important to get the matter in perspective and said that I was
into such matters. I am guilty of many sins, but I did not do that then, and I have not done it today. Both sides are to blame to some extent, and we should urgently address the problem by homing in on poor managers in the NHS, particularly senior ones who have suppressed the truth.
The Minister is guilty of many sins, but when she was a Treasury Minister she was the first person to see to it that there were no longer fibs on death certificates. She ensured that the cause of death was properly recorded. Previously, pneumonia and septicaemia might be put down as the cause of death, when the truth was that the death was MRSA-related. My hon. Friend remedied that. However, now that there is accurate reporting, she faces a problem. She is being chastised by the Opposition.
6.49 pm
Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con): In today's Britain, our lives are in greater danger when we are in hospital than when we are driving a car. What an extraordinary position to be in. MRSA and other hospital-acquired infections are ripping people's lives apart. Children have lost parents, parents have lost children and families have been torn apart.
It is not just that our lives are in danger; it is that our long-term health and well-being are also in danger. I know of cases of people losing limbs after catching MRSA in our hospitals; children who have been left partially handicapped after catching MRSA in our hospitals; and people who have been left housebound for months because of hospital-acquired infections. It is nothing short of a national disgrace, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) put it, it is a profound concern.
It is an absurd protestation from the Minister, in what I am sure will be her last speech in the House, that the problem has not changed in 25 years. Let me give her a direct example of why she is wrong. Pressure from the Government is making things worse. In my constituency, Epsom hospital is under great pressure. The neighbouring accident and emergency department at Crawley has been closed. The hospital is swamped with work and has a huge overflow of patients as a result of that closure. But the Government are demanding that it meet the four-hour waiting time target in accident and emergency, even with the extra patients. They are not just demanding; they are threatening managers if they fail to meet that target.
Dr. Starkey : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Chris Grayling:
No, I have only five minutes.
2 Mar 2005 : Column 1065
Direct and unpleasant pressure is being put on the management team. Operations are being cancelled and elderly patients are being moved into a store room that has been converted at the neighbouring hospital, which was once a ward. As a member of staff who came to see me recently, too scared initially to give her name, said:
Epsom is not an isolated case. Throughout the NHS, doctors, nurses and hospital managers are coming under the most intense pressure to meet the requirements of Ministers. Some have even resorted to falsifying the figures, and infection control goes out of the window. Is it any wonder that the MRSA problem is getting worse and worse?
Is it not astonishing and alarming that 100,000 people a year catch a hospital-acquired infection? Surely Ministers have learnt from the experience of their own constituents how bad the problem is. The problem is one of rising disease, rising infection and appalling hygiene standards in many of our hospitals.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) referred to one of his constituents who also wrote to me about the state of the toilets in that hospital. He said:
"I decided to try the other toilet; this doubles as a store room and at the time of my visit ¾ of the floor space was taken up with wheelchairs and large cardboard boxes . . . Bear in mind that all these boxes had come off the back of a lorry . . . Having used the lavatory, in order to get to the . . . wash basin it was necessary to move 2 or 3 wheelchairs thereby possibly contaminating the wheelchair."
That description is from a hospital that gets a green light on hygiene from the Government—another meaningless statistic from the Government that bears no relation whatever to the real experience of patients. All of this is happening today in hospitals around the country as we debate in this place.
The Government seek to pass the blame on to the last Conservative Government. They want the country to believe that the problem is down to contracting out cleaning services, but their own studies show that there is no correlation between contracting out and hospital-acquired infections. I have not noticed Ministers rushing to bring cleaning contracts back in-house. If a cleaning company is not doing its job properly, perhaps it is time to change the cleaning company.
Is it not about time that we addressed the problem in the real way that is necessary? Is it not about time that we had nurses properly in charge of their wards—a new generation of matrons with the power to withhold money from cleaning companies and if necessary to close a ward to ensure that it can be properly cleaned?
The Government have palpably failed to tackle the problem of MRSA, and their clumsy attempts to micro-manage the NHS from Whitehall are just making matters worse. In Britain today people are scared to go to hospital. What a damning indictment of eight years of Labour rule. What a disgrace in a country such as ours. It is time to do something about it, and after 5 May the next Conservative Government will do something about it.
6.54 pm
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |