THE number of deaths linked to the hospital bug Clostridium difficile has outstripped those due to MRSA.
Deaths involving Clostridium difficile rose by 69 per cent to 3,800 from 2004-05, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday. In the same period, MRSA mentions on death certificates increased by 39 per cent to 1,629.
The government said yesterday that cutting deaths from killer bugs was a ‘major challenge’.
This epidemic is very much the responsibility of the Labour government and its Tory predecessor.
Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) was introduced by the Thatcher government in the mid 1980s when the policy led to the privatisation of much of hospital cleaning and the onset of contract cleaners and dirty hospitals.
The concept of the ‘generic worker’ was introduced. This was a worker who cleaned the hospital, and then served food to the patients, while helping the medical staff with their other tasks.
The end result of contract cleaners and the ‘generic worker’ was far fewer cleaning staff doing a lot more work and too little cleaning. This was the base for the rise of the NHS hospital super bugs.
The Tories also introduced the Private Finance Initiative under which private companies built hospitals and then leased them to the NHS making massive profits over a thirty years lease.
Part of the PFI deals were the privatising of all of the ancillary services in the PFI hospitals. Brand new PFI hospitals were opened which became centres of disease not centres of excellence due to the ending of conscientious in-house cleaning.
The other major Tory contribution to health care was the BSE-vCJD epidemic amongst cattle and then humans.
The Tory argument was that it did not matter that cattle were fed sheep products infected with scrapie despite all of the evidence that this process led to mad cow disease, BSE.
The scientists who insisted that this was the case and that the disease could cross over to humans were persecuted by a Tory government campaign.
However, this is what actually happened. vCJD, the human derivative from BSE, has a long incubation period, so nobody knows just how many cases of vCJD there will be.
One consequence of this is that many national hospital networks, including the US, will not use blood from Britain because of the risk that their patients will be contaminated with vCJD. Irish hospitals will not take blood from former residents of the UK!
British hospital patients however, have to take their chances.
Labour took over from the Tories in 1997. It immediately dropped its opposition to the PFI and the privatisation of ancillary services, thereby magnifying the problem of the hospital superbugs.
There is now an epidemic of dirty hospitals and superbug problems.
The ONS figures showed that between 2001 and 2005 MRSA was mentioned on one in every 500 death certificates in England and Wales. For C. difficile it was one in every 250.
The head of health at Unison, Karen Jennings, said of the government figures: ‘These shocking figures show that MRSA and C difficile have a deadly grip on our NHS. Dirt is not cheap.
‘We need to wage war on these superbugs and cleaning and cleaners should be on the front line as an integral part of the infection control team.
‘No one wants to be treated in a dirty hospital but sadly the culture of cleaning was sold off at the same time as compulsory competitive tendering was brought in.
‘It’s time for hospitals to set safe minimum staffing levels for their cleaning services – patients and staff deserve nothing less.’
Dirty hospitals are part of the Thatcher-Blair legacy.
What is needed is a workers’ government that will end the PFI, restore all hospital cleaning in-house to the NHS, doubling or tripling the numbers of cleaners, and ending the situation where patients are at risk when they go into hospital for treatment.