Hospitals could face stiff penalties, including criminal charges, for fatally infecting patients with MRSA in a Government strategy designed to bring the growing crisis on Britain’s wards under control.
Jane Kennedy, the Health Minister, said that proposals due to go out for consultation later this year could include the option of bringing criminal charges against hospital trusts which fail to follow Government guidance, leading to deaths.
Ms Kennedy was responding to research published today by the powerful Public Accounts Committee of MPs, which condemned the Government for its lack of adequate monitoring of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and its reliance on “rough and ready” figures up to 20 years out of date. It said that patients are being exposed to an unknown number of potentially lethal infections because of the resulting “fog of ignorance.”
Infections picked up in healthcare environments are said to amount to at least 300,000 a year in England, with an estimated 5,000 deaths and costing the NHS £1 billion a year.
Advertisement
Edward Leigh, the Tory chairman of the PAC in the last Parliament, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the failure to accurately monitor the number of all types of infections acquired in hospitals meant that “we don’t know, in detail, how many people die [from them]”.
Only figures for MRSA — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — are now published after mandatory surveillance. The committee said that this accounted for less than 6 per cent of all hospital-acquired infections.
The PAC said that four years had passed since it first highlighted the shortage of information, yet a full surveillance programme had still not been put in place.
Mr Leigh said that an over-reliance on antibiotics had helped to create the new generation of superbugs, whilst failure to adopt basic standards of hygiene was providing them with an environment in which to thrive.
He said: “We have been handing out antibiotics like sweets for the best part of 50 years and hospitals are not as clean as they should be. The government must get a grip on this. There’s no point having the best technology in the world if people aren’t washing their hands between patients.”
Advertisement
Ms Kennedy highlighted new figures published by the Department of Health which show that the rate of MRSA bloodstream infections in English hospitals fell by 6.1 per cent in 2004-05 compared with 2003-04 — down 472 to 7,212. This is the lowest since mandatory recording began in April 2001.
She said that monitoring of four other infections had been introduced over the past two years, including the potentially fatal Clostridium difficile, but no findings had yet been published.
Asked whether it would be appropriate for hospital trusts to face criminal charges, she said: “The Health and Safety Executive does have the power to make criminal sanctions, whether it’s appropriate in the case is something we will have to consider.”
“We will be consulting later this summer on a Code of Practice which will include sanctions. I’m not saying that criminal sanctions will be part of it – we will want to listen to the views of stakeholders.” she added.
“If there’s a major breakdown and a hospital fails to take the warning, guidance and instruction it receives; if that happens and then deaths follow it’s accepted that sanctions should be made against the trust.
Advertisement
“What those sanctions should be ... we need something appropriate and proportional and will be listening to the voices of the public when we consult on that next summer.
The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital yesterday confirmed that a virulent strain of C. difficile was a factor in the deaths of 13 patients since the beginning of this year. The announcement came a week after it emerged that 12 people treated at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Buckinghamshire, have also died from the infection.
The Government recently introduced mandatory surveillance for the bug, as well as for glycopeptide-resistant enterococci and surgical site infections, but the measures still only cover 20 per cent of HAIs, MPs said yesterday.
Their report, entitled Improving Patient Care by Reducing the Risk of Hospital-Acquired Infection, came as the Department of Health published new figures showing falling rates of the MRSA superbug.
The MPs concluded that compliance with good infection-control practice such as hand hygiene was “patchy” and “poor”, especially among doctors. They noted that the Government had made infection rates and hospital cleanliness a priority, with a number of schemes to tackle the problem.