Orders of the Day — Health Protection Agency Bill [Lords]

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:22 pm on 21 June 2004.

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Photo of Peter Lilley Peter Lilley Conservative, Hitchin and Harpenden 6:22, 21 June 2004

My hon. Friend makes another very good point. I hope that we do all know what is wrong, and I intend to investigate further the causes of this problem.

I became interested in the subject partly as a result of cases that I encountered in my own "surgery", as we tend to call our advice bureaux in our constituencies. Over the years, I have met people who lost relatives as a result of infections acquired in the course of hospital operations or who themselves had acquired the infection and been maimed permanently by it. I was sub-consciously aware that there was an issue there.

Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the health service entitled "Patient Power". While I was working on it, I discovered the National Audit Office estimates of the scale of the problem. I campaigned for the publication of information authority-by-authority, hospital-by-hospital, on these sorts of problems, so that patients would have the power to take informed decisions on the basis of that information. It was as a result of the subsequent publication of such information that I learned that the trusts in my own constituency had very poor records at that time and were near the bottom of the national league table. Indeed, one was virtually at the bottom. I am happy to say that both those trusts now take this issue seriously and that both have improved their ranking markedly—they are now close to the national average.

A little while ago, I had a meeting with the infection control directorate at the East and North Hertfordshire NHS trust, and a lengthy briefing from the clinical standards officer at the West Hertfordshire trust. I am glad that this issue is now being given priority locally: I would like to see it given an even higher priority at the national level and I hope that the HPA will play its role in that.

We have to ask ourselves why, given the manifest dedication of most people who work in the NHS, to whom I pay tribute, does this problem exist, and why have we as a nation been so slow to face up to it? Part of the answer to the latter question lies in the fact that, as a former health Minister said, the NHS has become part of our national religion. As a result, we are reluctant to think that anything can go wrong within it. We do not want to accept or face up to the fact that it can be a place where illnesses are caused and acquired as well as cured and treated, but we must accept it. Moreover, the Government must face up to it. I am afraid that some people in government are still in denial about the problem and believe that it can simply be spun away or ignored, but it cannot and it must not.

I shall not develop at great length—at least, not at this stage—the disgraceful episode that occurred last autumn. The Government issued a statement to try to pretend that they were doing something about the problem, but when asked to bring the statement before the House, they admitted that they were doing nothing new at all. That was symptomatic of the their attempts to deny the problem. The Minister's failure even to mention it today in the context of the Bill suggests that some in government are still in denial about the seriousness of the problem.