Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Plenary, 26 Mar 2008

26 Mar 2008 · S3 · Plenary

Item of business

Health Care Associated Infection

Simpson, Dr Richard Lab Mid Scotland and Fife Watch on SPTV

I hate to say this, but I could tell Nanette Milne numerous stories of when contract cleaners have come in, done their bit and gone away, leaving the question of who would clean up the mess in the toilet when someone was sick. Senior nurses end up having to do that. That is fine—we all have to muck in and do the job—but because the cleaners are not part of the team, they are not there all the time. Taking the services back in-house is important.

Important too are the overall staff structures. When she responds to the debate, I would like the Minister for Public Health to address the December 2007 report "National Hand Hygiene NHS Campaign". Under the heading "Next Steps", the report says that funding to allow local health board co-ordinator posts should

"continue for at least two years".

Such work should be mainstreamed. I assume that that can be dealt with using the new funding. We need the whole team to be in place.

I welcome the cabinet secretary's announcement of a nurse consultant for the care commission, but I agree with Mary Scanlon that progress must be made on care homes. Irene Oldfather reminded us that inability to provide home care on a day-case basis can lead to unnecessary hospital admissions, which adds to the pressures.

I welcome the screening programme that has been announced and the funding for it, although I would correct one thing that the cabinet secretary said. Alan Johnson has announced the introduction of screening for all elective patients by March 2009 and for emergency patients as soon as possible over the next three years. He has announced £130 million of funding to achieve that. He has praised the Dutch programme to which Ross Finnie and Jamie Stone referred. The Dutch call it the "search and destroy" system. That programme—Sandra White referred to two other research programmes—will have to be considered carefully. Before any pilots are established, I hope that the monitoring or evaluation group will have a chance to comment on how they are being run.

I have not covered hand hygiene to any great extent. The variation in compliance rates in the two audit periods is alarming. The range in compliance is 50 per cent to 94 per cent in the first audit period and increases to only 59 per cent to 94 per cent in the second audit period, so the 90 per cent target, which I welcome—it is also the World Health Organization's target—is entirely appropriate. It is a challenging target, and we will need a partnership between different groups to achieve it. As Margaret Curran and James Kelly indicated, it is important that patients be encouraged to say to doctors—who are the worst-performing group in the monitoring figures—that they must wash their hands when they move from one patient to another. The Scottish patient safety alliance should be asked to help in that regard.

The audit is obviously important. We are making good progress, but there needs to be a full partnership between health care staff, patients and visitors. We also need to share experience with our colleagues in England, who are introducing substantial programmes, so that we do not develop different methods. The funding in England is huge—£270 million annually by 2011—so I wonder whether we will have enough funding to tackle the issue in the way that the cabinet secretary clearly wants to.

Search Hansard contributions

Plenary, 26 Mar 2008

In the same item of business