Comment: Fatal results of missed targets

Nov 12 2007 Liverpool Daily Post

THE potentially lethal MRSA bug has become one of the biggest crises to affect the health service, mainly because it has developed a resistance to certain antibiotics and is therefore much more difficult to treat.

That is why it is particularly worrying that Merseyside’s largest hospitals are failing to meet targets for reducing MRSA – in stark contrast to the Government’s own positive announcements on this issue.

Figures circulated among senior figures at the North West Strategic Health Authority reveal, for example, that both Aintree Hospital, and Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen NHS Trust, are already close to reaching their expected annual total for MRSA cases, many months before the end of the financial year.

The latest figures come just weeks after half-yearly figures showed a reduction in the number of cases of MRSA being contracted in wards, but the new target figures show that hospital trusts will miss government pledges to massively slash MRSA cases by next year.

Behind all the discussion of targets, however, lies a fact that can all too easily be forgotten – that patients are genuinely frightened of catching a superbug in hospital.

It should be pointed out that the picture is not universally bleak. Both the Clatterbridge Centre in Wirral and Liverpool Women’s Hospital were reported as not having recorded a single case of MRSA in the first three months of the financial year – although the Women’s has since admitted that four babies in its premature baby unit were found to be carrying the bug.

St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust has also seen a massive improvement since government assistance was offered to tackle MRSA.

The Conservatives have tried to make political capital out of the situation by blaming the new problems on bed cuts.

However, MRSA is too important and too serious an issue to be treated as government spin on the one hand, or as a political football on the other.