Clean up wards or lose your patients, hospitals are warned

Dirty NHS hospitals that fail hygiene standards will be stopped from treating patients under a new inspection scheme.

The Care Quality Commission has set out new ground rules for how NHS trusts must make improvements in preventing the spread of hospital superbugs.

All hospital boards will have to sign a declaration from January saying whether or not they have met the various requirements on the Government's hygiene code.

Trusts that are unable to comply to the new code face the risk of not meeting the standard for registration as an NHS provider. This, however, would only apply to a small number of repeat offender hospitals.

Without the registration, hospitals could lose a licence to treat patients and be forced to stop operating.

A total of 41 NHS hospital trusts admitted failing to observe one or more parts of the hygiene code in June this year.

The original hygiene code was set up in October 2006 amid growing concern about the spread of MRSA, clostridium difficile and other superbugs.

Baroness Barbara Young, Head of the commission, told The Guardian: 'I doubt there will be many to whom we say, "Up with this we cannot put; we will not register you."

'We want to talk softly and carry a big stick. We are the Care Quality Commission, not the care failure commission.'

She added that she expected a 'large number' of trusts to gain immediate registration. Others will be allowed to register on condition that they present an action plan and timetable for improvements.

The commission is currently half way through an inspection programme. Baroness Young says only four hospitals have achieved a low enough standard to warrant enforcement action.

The four hospitals were named as Bromley Hospitals, in Kent; Barnet and Chase Farm, north London; Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals in Middlesex and Surrey; and Ipswich Hospital in Suffolk.

The new rules would also see the commission intervene if trusts tried to improve hygiene standards but failed. In these cases, radical changes would be put in place by the commission until the hospital reached an acceptable standard.

The Department of Health has also set out plans to give the commission powers to issue hospitals with fines for not meeting the conditions after being granted registration.