A report due by the end of September will form the basis of new procedures to address hygiene deficiencies in hospitals, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said today.
It also announced that new hand hygiene guidelines and new guidelines for hospitals on combating hospital-acquired infection will be launched next month.
The commitment comes as an Irish Timesreport today showed incidents of the MRSA bug are far higher than officially estimated. It revealed that at least 8,000 patients tested positive for potentially fatal bugs last year. However, the report said the problem could be greater because hospitals are not required to collect data or screen for super bugs.
Fine Gael Spokesman on Health Dr Liam Twomey
Commenting on the news, Fine Gael Health spokesman, Dr Liam Twomey, called for a uniform method of detecting and reporting incidents.
Dr Twomey said the newspaper report showed the problem is worse than previously thought and added that overcrowding in A&E wards could make things worse.
"The problem of further cross infections is heightened with over 200 people each day lying on hospital trolleys in overcrowded A&Es," he said.
The HSE said an independent hygiene audit of more than 50 acute hospitals would be submitted to the director of the National Hospitals Office at the executive and "will be made public" by the end of next month.
"The final report will form the basis for the implementation of the necessary changes in both work environments and working practices that will be needed to meet the highest possible standards of cleanliness in our hospitals," a HSE spokesman said.
He added that there was a need for collation and dissemination of information to assist the implementation of the National Strategy for Anti Microbial Resistance, which aims to address the problem of new strains of bug with higher levels of tolerance to antibiotics.
The HSE will be asking every hospital in the country to report on progress in combating hospital acquired infections every three months, he added.