ON the day before the Penrose Inquiry into contaminated blood given to NHS patients publishes its report, the Scottish Government launched a new multimillion-pound initiative to tackle healthcare-associated infections.
Health Secretary Shona Robison yesterday announced that a grant of £4.2 million had been awarded to researchers investigating the prevention and control of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
The most notorious outbreak of HAIs in Scotland took place in 2007 and 2008, when 131 patients contracted Clostridium Difficile (C.Diff) at Vale of Leven Hospital in West Dunbartonshire.
Lord MacLean’s inquiry into the outbreak concluded C.Diff was a “causal factor” in the deaths of 34 patients in an 18-month period at Vale of Leven.
The new Scottish Government funding is said to be a direct response to the 440-page MacLean Report, which, apart from castigating “serious personal and systemic failures” within the NHS, also recommended the establishment of HAI task forces.
The new grant has been provided to a consortium of researchers from Scottish universities, led by Glasgow University, to establish a new Scottish Healthcare-Associated Infection Prevention Institute (SHAIPI).
Cases of C.Diff and the most well-known HAI, MRSA, fell in Scotland in 2014 to among their lowest levels on record, but still cost £183m annually and occur in five per cent of the acute hospital population.
On a visit to Glasgow University, Health Secretary Robison said the investment was about taking the “next step” to reduce infections even further.
The new SHAIPI will be tasked with developing new interventions to prevent the spread of infection; researching new ways of using existing antibiotics more effectively and efficiently; developing new genome-based diagnostic tools to identify current and new emerging HAIs; and using data to identify patients who might be prone to HAIs or who might have increased mortality as a result of HAIs.
Robison said: “We are committed in our drive to tackling and reducing the spread of healthcare-associated infections. This significant investment towards research will allow us to take the next step in our fight to bring down infection levels further.
“This is one of the single biggest research grants awarded in recent years that aims to investigate ways to further reduce healthcare-associated infections.
“This is truly a national effort, bringing together expertise from a number of Scottish universities and Scotland’s NHS with a clear focus towards making our hospitals safer for all those patients who use them.”
Over the next five years, the SHAIPI will establish a virtual hub in which 19 co-investigators from the universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, St Andrews and Strathclyde will work together with a range of health boards and strategic partners to look at new ways of dealing with the challenge of antimicrobial resistance and emerging HAIs.
The consortium of researchers will be led by Professor Alistair Leanord, director of the Scottish Infection Research Network at the University of Glasgow.
Professor Leanord said: “The formation of the Scottish HAI Prevention Institute (SHAIPI) is a direct result of the Scottish Government delivering one of the largest single investments into healthcare associated infection research in the UK.
“This new institute will allow researchers from a number of universities throughout Scotland to work together, alongside the NHS, to develop and use state- of-the-art methods to identify, prevent and treat patients affected by healthcare-associated infections.
“Finding new ways of caring for and treating patients is at the centre of this research. We are going to develop ways of using data more effectively, allowing us to identify high-risk patients requiring intensive management, improve our understanding of the bugs by using new genome technology, and use this information to design new treatments, ways of working and how best to use antibiotics to treat and prevent the spread of healthcare- associated infection within the NHS.”
The use of genome technology will be led by St Andrews University, where the research is being headed by Professor Stephen Gillespie, the Sir James Black Professor of Medicine, and Dr Matthew Holden, reader in bacterial genomics and evolution.
Announcing St Andrews’ £1m programme of genome research into HAIs, Gillespie said: “The new SHAIPI consortium is an important development. We will be exploring new ways to use the latest technology to deliver more rapid diagnosis, and a safer health service to the people of Scotland.”
Holden said: “Genome sequencing will provide an unprecedented view of the genetic makeup of bacteria that causes disease in hospitals, and help us target them more effectively and prevent their spread.”
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