Waiting time targets in the NHS are hampering efforts to reduce “superbug” infections such as MRSA, doctors’ leaders have claimed.

Patients are being placed on dirty beds to help hospitals meet the requirement to start treatment within four hours of admission.

Today the British Medical Association (BMA) called on the Government to allow more flexibility in the target to ensure there is enough time to clean equipment.

Despite declining rates of MRSA and Clostridium difficile, healthcare-associated infections remain a “significant” problem for the NHS, with Britain having some of the highest rates in Europe, the BMA said in a report on tackling the issue.

The pressure to admit patients quickly and a shortage of isolation facilities at peak times are “critical challenges to maintaining high quality patient care”, the report states. Moving staff and patients around the hospital, in an effort to meet targets, also contributed to the spread of germs.

The BMA said that patients with non-urgent conditions would understand if they had to wait an extra hour to be admitted to hospital while a ward was properly cleaned to minimise the risk of infection.

There needed to be a focus on long-term action and a will to drive down all infections, not just MRSA and C. difficile, it added.

Medical processes could be improved, and meticulous hand-washing and proper prescribing of antibiotics should be encouraged, as overuse of the drugs is known to build up the resistance of microbes, the report concludes.

Jonathan Fielden, chairman of the BMA’s consultants committee, said: “Hygiene, hand-washing and antibiotic policies have extremely important roles to play, but if we want to reduce the spread of infections we must put safety in front of political targets.

“With many hospitals already working at full capacity, \ will only get more pressurised as winter arrives, but you need time to clean.

“If you ask a patient whether they want care now or safe care in an hour, they wouldn’t mind waiting for the safe care. Existing targets need to take the need for good infection control into account.”

The BMA’s report said that staff or hospitals should face sanctions if they failed to implement simple strategies such as washing hands with soap and water or using alcohol gels.

A £50 million deep clean of all hospitals in England was ordered by ministers in 2007, concluding in March last year.

But Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA’s head of science and ethics, said that the policy needed to be part of a package of long-term measures to maintain regular, thorough cleaning of hospitals.

“Deep cleaning is a good thing provided you go in and do all the other organisational things and keep your cleaning at a high level,” she said.

This includes proper cleaning of things such as bedside lockers and rails, the buttons on machines and switches.

Dr Nathanson added that areas of a hospital that posed the greatest risk of harbouring germs were not always included in cleaning contracts. Roughly half of all hospital cleaning has been outsourced to private companies.

Ann Keen, the Health Minister, responded that the latest figures showed that MRSA infections had fallen by 65 per cent and C. difficile infections were down by 35 per cent.

“It is difficult to understand the BMA’s suggestion that our broad integrated strategy to reduce healthcare associated infection has been anything other than a success.

“However, we accept that one preventable infection is one too many and we continue to battle against infections on every front.”

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: “This report provides further evidence that the Government's obsession with targets is putting patient safety at risk.

“Ministers need to stop micromanaging the NHS and trust doctors and nurses to decide the best way to care for their patients.”

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