Antimicrobials: Drug Resistance

(asked on 13th March 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve hand hygiene compliance in hospitals to tackle antimicrobial resistance; and what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of using health technology to improve such compliance.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 16th March 2018

The current five year United Kingdom Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) strategy was published at the end of 2013. Work is underway to consider the priorities and focus for a refreshed strategy and national action plan for publication at the end of 2018. The refreshed strategy will continue to focus on preventing infections as one of its key pillars.

The current AMR programme has an ambition to halve healthcare associated Gram–negative blood stream infections by 2020/2021. NHS Improvement leads this work and has included hand hygiene in its work programme for 2018/19 in support of the ambition. As part of our work on the refreshed strategy, we will consider how to make best use of evidence-based and cost-effective technology.

We are working with our partners across the health and social care system, including the Care Quality Commission, to ensure that consideration of best practice in hand hygiene policies remains a focus of inspections in acute trusts.

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