DIRTY uniforms are putting patients’ lives at risk, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said yesterday.

Calling for every nurse to be provided with a clean uniform for every shift, the RCN said that better laundry facilities, clean changing rooms and a range of other improvements were needed to bring hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA under control.

A survey published in Nursing Standard found that less than half of trusts that responded provided nurses with enough uniforms to change before every shift. The new government will need to buy hundreds of thousands of new ones to achieve this “absolute minimum” target, the RCN said.

MRSA has become a big issue in the election campaign, with the Conservatives and Labour blaming each other for the rise of an infection that, with other hospital-acquired infections, is estimated to claim 5,000 lives a year. Research has shown that uniforms can act as a reservoir of infections, with the areas around the pockets, cuffs and aprons the most contaminated.

This means that even if nurses wash their hands regularly, they can become recontaminated by contact with their uniforms. Regular washing at a high temperature is the answer, but two thirds of the trusts responding to the survey provided no laundry facilities.

In a further quarter of trusts, nurses did not feel able to use a service they felt was inadequate. In total, about 90 per cent of healthcare staff had to take sole responsibility for the cleanliness of their uniforms, taking them home to wash.

Only a quarter of hospitals had adequate changing facilities, forcing nurses to change in the lavatories or wear their uniforms on the way home.

Beverly Malone, general secretary of the RCN, said: “It’s common sense that healthcare staff should have a separate uniform for every shift they work, but we know this often isn’t the case and the implications for infection control are obvious.

“If the next government is committed to providing just one extra uniform for each nurse working in the NHS today, they would need to provide 400,000 more uniforms.

“But extra uniforms are just the beginning. We also need to make sure that hospitals provide laundry and changing facilities so that staff know their uniforms have been washed at a high enough temperature and that they are not forced to travel to and from work in them. Some of our nurses report having to change in and out of their uniforms in ward toilets. This is totally unacceptable.”

The survey got responses from infection-control teams representing 101 trusts. Two thirds of trusts did not launder uniforms and of those that did, a small minority (7 per cent) achieved a turnaround time of less than 24 hours.

The RCN, in collaboration with the Infection Control Nurses Association and Kimberly-Clark, which makes hygiene products, started a “Wipe it Out” campaign yesterday seeking a range of improvements going well beyond the provision of clean uniforms.

The campaign also calls for:

• Mandatory infection control training for new staff
• Better teaching of infection control at undergraduate level
• Matrons to be given powers to ensure cleanliness
• 24-hour cleaning team avail-able in all acute hospitals
• Better systems for staff and patients to report poor practice
• Budgets of £5,000 per ward announced by the Government in 2000 to be adequately resourced and delivered

  Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, promised yesterday that if elected, his government would make £10 million available to enable hospital trusts to deploy state-of-the-art nasal swab testing technology, enabling MRSA to be identified in hours rather than days.

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