Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-181)

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH

8 SEPTEMBER 2004

  Q180 Mr Allan: What is nice on this Committee is to see that people have learnt from mistakes and made improvements. When we are building new hospitals, we are not just building new buildings but we have new cleaning contracts, and it is a greenfield opportunity. One would hope that they would be better than the old ones. Can you produce data on the new hospitals versus the old ones to see if this investment of public money is making any difference to the public concern? [11]Most of them will be PFI, but it is not the PFI bit that I am interested in; it is the fact that it is a new site with new management hopefully and new procedures. Secondly, Sir Nigel, it is fair to say that a lot of what you have said today is that in a sense the management has been overstretched; you have been dealing with so many other initiatives that this has not been a priority and that is why you have not done as much over the last four years as you could have done.

  Sir Nigel Crisp: I think I said that it has been a priority, but there have been other priorities as well, and what managers have to do is to manage those priorities together. If there were this one thing that we were singly focused on, we would have moved further—I have no doubt about this. We have actually moved forward on quite a broad range of things.

  Q181 Mr Allan: In that context, what one is concerned about with foundation hospitals is that they will be another management distraction. It would be helpful, as they progress, to be able to see the distinction between foundation hospitals dealing with this issue, and other hospitals. They

 have been sold to us, as it were, as improving things across the board. The concern must be that for management priorities, the fact that they are having to do everything new and working with these new bodies may be a distraction rather than an assistance.

  Sir Nigel Crisp: Can I make one point on that, which is a very important one? I believe that the NHS is learning to be ever better at talking and listening to its patients and treating people, and this is part of the choice agenda, to start treating people as the owners of the system apart from anything else—that they should be treated with respect and not with arrogance.

  Chairman: I think, Sir Nigel, you should quit while you are ahead and end on that point because that is a very good answer and nobody now will ask you any more questions. I have a couple of points, which you can deal with in a note, to save time. You referred to figure 8 and making this information available to patients. Currently participation in surveillance is voluntary. Are you now going to make it mandatory for all hospitals? We would like to have a note on that. [12]I understand from the Sun newspaper that there are no cases of MRSA in Gt Ormond St Hospital, and it would be interesting to know why that is. [13]Lastly, and most importantly, we have focused heavily on MRSA today, but why is so little information available on other infections? Perhaps I could have a further note on that. [14]This was brought up right at the end of the hearing by possibly the most important question of the whole afternoon, which came from my colleague Mr Williams, where apparently the figure that we are now dealing with is not 300,000 but 600,000; and I think we will have to return to this in our report because it is extremely important, with the help of the National Audit Office. Perhaps lastly, Sir Nigel, the very last word should go to Florence Nightingale, who wrote in 1860: "It cannot be necessary to tell a nurse that she should be clean or that she should keep her patient clean seeing that the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness." I am sure you would all agree with that. Thank you very much.







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