Sir Liam's annual report featured the case of Ian Kelly, 46, who went into hospital for a routine operation five years ago and ended up losing his leg to MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus).
Mr Kelly described how he watched cleaners mop lavatories and then serve patients their breakfast, and how they failed to keep the ward clean.
'If my shoe was on the floor they wouldn't move it, they would mop round it and then would go on the main ward with
the same bucket,' he recalled. Mr Kelly said he had been reluctant to ask hospital staff to wash their hands before touching him.
'After my operation the nurses and the specialists rarely wore gloves, which worried me,' he said. 'I didn't like to ask the surgeon to put gloves on. And I never saw them wash their hands.'
The chief medical officer's report said that improving hand hygiene was even more important than making sure wards were clean.
He said that experience in other countries had proved that improvements in standards of hand hygiene cut infection rates and saved lives.
In Switzerland, a sustained push by the government led to a 40-fold increase in the use of alcoholic hand-rubs, which caused the MRSA rate to more than halve.
But in the UK many staff did not automatically wash their hands any longer because they were too dependent on antibiotics and because hand hygiene amongst the general population had declined. Even those who understand the importance of good hand hygiene say it often gets pushed into the background when they are working on a busy ward.
Studies show that nurses on a paediatric ward should wash their hands around eight times an hour, while for intensive care nurses it was closer to 22 times. But this was not happening.
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: 'Most of the people in hospital are elderly and many will feel unable to challenge medical staff.
'We believe that putting the responsibility on patients is not the right approach. Hand hygiene should be ingrained in medical training.
'Doctors take the Hippocratic oath not to harm patients but by not washing their hands they can be harming patients.'
In 2006, 8 per cent of adult patients in an English hospital at any one time suffered from a healthcare-associated infection.
The National Audit Office says there were 300,000 healthcare-associated infections every year, causing at least 5,000 deaths.
This equates to the infection of a patient every two minutes and a death every two hours.
Cases of the superbug Clostridium difficile rose 8 per cent last year to 55,681 in patients aged 65 and over.
Although the number of MRSA cases is falling, a leaked memo earlier this year revealed that ministers did not expect to meet the Government's target to halve the rate of MRSA bloodstream infections by next April.
The Daily Mail has revealed that superbug deaths had more than doubled in care homes in the past two years.
The Healthcare Commission, the Government's health standards watchdog, is to carry out 'spot checks' on 120 trusts over the next year.
Two weeks ago, new Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced £50million of new funding to pay for better infection control in hospitals.
INFANT DEATHS
•Five hundred babies a year are dying needlessly because of problems during labour, the chief medical officer warned.
They start labour apparently healthy and then are either stillborn or die shortly after birth. The number of 'intrapartum-related deaths' has remained unchanged since 2000 and around three-quarters are avoidable.
Sir Liam said the level was ' unacceptable' and called for a renewed effort to cut the figure.
He called for more post-mortem examinations to be carried out to understand the causes of deaths and more research.
RADIATION RISK
•The lives of at least 40 patients every year are put at risk because they are given the wrong doses of radiation, Sir Liam said.
Changes were needed to avoid cases like that of Lisa Norris, 16, from Ayrshire, who died after receiving 19 overdoses.
Over the past five years, around 200 errors have been reported in which the dosage of radiation given to cancer and other patients was too high or too low.
Sir Liam said that to prevent miscalculation the size of the dose should be checked after it is first given, but this method is used in only 40 per cent of English hospitals.
THE ORGAN CRISIS
•Everyone should be on the organ donation register unless they specifically ask to be removed, Sir Liam said.
It was the only way to combat the transplant 'crisis', which has led to the death of one person a day because of an acute shortage of organs, he added.
The current system in which people 'opt in' to the donor system should be scrapped. Instead, all should be considered a potential donor unless they have registered to say they do not want to be.
Sir Liam said similar systems of 'presumed consent' introduced in other European countries - such as Spain - had significantly increased the number of organs available.
Safeguards would be built into any system to allow religious groups to opt out easily. Relatives of the dead would be able to object in 'special circumstances'.
Sir Liam said: 'To meet current demand for organs the number of people on the NHS organ donor register would need to approximately treble.'
Three years ago, MPs rejected legislation to introduce presumed consent, but Sir Liam said the situation had deteriorated so badly that he hoped many would now have changed their mind.
But Timothy Statham, chief executive of the National Kidney Federation, said the idea would not see a dramatic rise in organ transplants because the NHS did not have the surgeons, intensive care beds and money to carry them out. |
