Hansard

I welcome the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing's statement. In the spirit of consensus, I acknowledge the work that the previous Labour and Liberal Democrat Executive did to tackle HAI. However, despite the inception of the HAI task force in 2003, patients are still being exposed to avoidable infections. The overall rate in acute hospitals remains high: the cabinet secretary stated that it is in the region of 9.5 per cent. I was interested to note that hospital-acquired infections contributed to 422 deaths in Scotland last year, which represents a 5 per cent increase compared with 2005. Some 13 per cent of deaths are now associated with infections that are acquired after surgery. There is clearly a deep-running problem in our hospitals and health service if so many people suffer from hospital-acquired infections and, tragically, so many lives continue to be lost because of them.

I welcome the fact that, soon after she took up her portfolio, the cabinet secretary made it clear that tackling hospital-acquired infections was a priority not just for the Government but for her personally. In November last year, she announced £54 million to be invested in the coming three years to drive down hospital infections. Those resources underscore the Government's commitment to ensuring that preventing people from acquiring infections when they receive health care continues to be a priority in our health service.

A considerable part of the cabinet secretary's speech focused on MRSA. The problems associated with MRSA in the NHS are not new; they have been around for many years. I can remember in my previous career dealing with many patients who had MRSA, which extended their period in hospital and, sadly, for some resulted in their passing away.

I was interested to note that 51 deaths were attributed to MRSA in 2006, which was 38 up on the previous year. I suspect that the sudden jump is due to greater recording on death certificates. As we have already heard from Mary Scanlon and Helen Eadie, there is an issue about recording deaths caused by MRSA. Professor Hugh Pennington has stated that the real number of deaths linked to MRSA could be 10 times greater than the official statistics, which depend on recording the cause of death on the death certificate. If we are to tackle what the cabinet secretary correctly described as a stubborn problem with MRSA, we must ensure that we have the right data on which to base our judgments, which means that deaths must be properly recorded.

I welcome the delivery plan to deal with the problem more effectively, and the screening programme, which will be introduced in pilots. I am disappointed that my health board—Forth Valley NHS Board—was not selected as a pathfinder board, although I am reassured that, if the screening programme is successful and proves worth while, Forth Valley will be in a position to implement it in 2009-10. The additional funding for the pathfinder boards is welcome in trying to deal with infections.

The cabinet secretary accepted that hospitals will never be sanitised, infection-free places and that control in tackling the problem is the way forward. I agree. She also highlighted the importance of hand hygiene. All the moves proposed in the delivery plan, including more auditing and ensuring compliance, are to be welcomed, but a more consistent approach is needed throughout different hospitals. In the past six months, I have been in four different hospitals, all of which have a different approach to ensuring that staff and visitors clean their hands properly when entering wards, visiting bed units or leaving. There is a need to ensure greater consistency because, as Ross Finnie said, we must get people on board—the patients and the people who visit hospital. I hope that, as part of the delivery programme, there will be greater focus on ensuring more consistency in how hospitals get the message across to people about when they should clean their hands.

My final point is on the design of some of our hospitals, because it is clear that some designs contribute to the problem. For example, a patient in a single bed unit who has an intravenous drip and is being barrier nursed and who does not have a toilet in their unit must leave the unit to use the toilet outside the ward, which compromises infection control. In the long term, we will need to ensure that patients who are barrier nursed in single bed units in some of our older hospital estate buildings have integrated toilet facilities. In this day and age, it is unacceptable to expect people to use commodes when they could use toilets.

Patients, the public and staff must be united in tackling the problem. I hope that, through the additional resources, we will start to drive down the number of hospital-acquired infections rather than stabilise it, as at present. By reducing such infections, we will ensure that patients have more faith that, when they go into hospital, they will not contract an infection.