When the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing will bring forward a real time system of surveillance and monitoring for hospital-acqui…

Real time local surveillance and monitoring is already in place in NHS boards. As part of the board wide review into numbers of clostridium difficile cases and deaths going back to December 2007 which is currently underway, all NHS boards have been asked to review and validate the performance of local surveillance systems and provide comments. Health Protection Scotland (HPS) and the Scottish Government will consider their responses to that exercise once the results are known at the end of July. Thereafter, HPS will produce draft guidance on local surveillance for healthcare associated infection (HAI) generally for discussion at the next HAI Task Force meeting on 3 September.
As confirmed to Ross Finnie at the question and answer session following the my statement at the Parliament on 18 June, I will update members about the above exercise should anything arise. I will also be discussing the adequacy of local systems and the type of monitoring that is being applied across each board area when I next meet with chief executives and we have asked HPS to ensure that all diagnostic labs are linked to the Electronic Communication of Surveillance in Scotland (ECOSS) system later this year to pave the way for a web-based local surveillance reporting system.