Are Government targets killing patients?

Deadly superbugs have increased despite a crackdown on the best-known infections such as MRSA, a parliamentary report will warn this week.

While rates of MRSA and Clostridium difficile are falling, after scandals over major outbreaks, other potentially fatal infections which receive less attention appear to be soaring, the Commons public accounts committee will say.

Around 300,000 infections are diagnosed in English hospitals every year – but many more potentially fatal bugs may be going undetected, because of a lack of surveillance, research has found.

A voluntary scheme charting all bloodstream infections found numbers increased by 30 per cent between 2003 and 2007, in what the committee's chairman Edward Leigh described as a "rising tide" of infections threatening all hospital patients.

The report is expected to show increasing numbers of cases of E-coli, linked to surgical site infections and urinary tract problems, and in cases of the bacterial infection klebsiella.

The Sunday Telegraph has established that the NHS' most senior doctors and scientists responsible for infection control believe their efforts are being hindered by Government waiting targets.

An anonymous survey of 170 NHS directors of infection control found that 59 per cent had experienced a clash between their efforts to block the spread of disease and rules which say new patients must be found a bed within four hours.

Infection experts say NHS managers are so fearful of missing the four hour target for Accident and Emergency patients to be admitted to a ward, that infected patients are being shunted around overcrowded hospitals, hastening the spread of disease, in a rush to clear space for new arrivals.

The four hour target has already been implicated in a series of NHS hospital scandals, in which hundreds died, but, on each occasion, ministers have insisted that poor management, rather than the target, was to blame.

In total, 100 of 170 directors at England's hospital trusts reported difficulties as a result of the four hour target, in research carried out for the National Audit Office.

A Department of Health spokesman said MRSA bloodstream infections had fallen by 74 per cent since 2003/04 and C. difficile infections by 35 per cent between 2007/08 and 2008/009.

So why have more than 30,000 people died between 2004 to 2008 after contracting the hospital infections MRSA and Clostridium difficile?

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