One of the key elements of the British superbug scandal is being tackled by making the faking of hospital statistics a criminal act.
Faking was not an occasional occurrence. "Fiddling" is widespread and massive.
If you pay people to produce good statistics, that is what you will get: good statistics. The reality ceases to matter.
Superbugs, including MRSA, have been far more common than admitted. The statistics for superbugs were made one measure of cleanliness and standard of care.
Who is going to own up to being dirty and lacking in care?
It was often superbugs coming from the community or farming anyway, and nothing to do with the hospital. They just get the problem created elsewhere. This is especially true of antibiotic resistant disease coming from intensive farming and arising from associated veterinary crime.
This gave the hospital management the apparent moral justification for excluding them from the figures and employing massive PR to swamp critics. Those seeking the truth were being attacked from all sides.
So, we don't know the full scale of superbugs or superbug deaths in Britain's hospitals any more than the public knows the true situation on our farms.
But the worst scandal of the 21st century is now being exposed.
It comes down to naïve and selfish management from the very top of the hospitals and organised crime in the government veterinary service and their many front and dependant associated organisations.
The full "Daily Telegraph" report is here.
New criminal offence to stop NHS hospitals 'fiddling' figures to be introduced.
A new criminal offence to stop NHS hospitals "fiddling" official figures is to be introduced by ministers in the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
By Robert Winnett, Political Editor
11:00PM GMT 15 Mar 2013
Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, is to announce that senior NHS managers and hospital trusts will be held criminally liable if they manipulate figures on waiting times or death rates.
Trusts could be fined millions of pounds and managers jailed if they are found to have falsified data used by patients to select where they are treated.
Several NHS hospitals have been accused recently of seeking to obscure high mortality rates by "mis recording" the reasons for deaths. Such practices make it hard for regulators and the public to identify hospitals that have poor standards of treatment...
