Dr. Tracey Cooper:

From our perspective, the clinicians are the ones with the responsibility but there is also the question of the power of the patient. I had this conversation with our staff recently and they said exactly the same thing to me, it is not easy. What do we do in society to give people help, to make it okay to challenge because we are not there yet? The responsibility is solely the clinician’s.

A couple of years ago I stood in a hospital, not in this country, looking into a four bed bay where there was someone with TB, someone on chemotherapy, someone who had cellulitis and I cannot remember what the other person had. It was visiting time, 2 p.m. in the afternoon, and these people had been on the ward for a few days so the visitors had got to know them. All the families that were visiting were shaking one another’s hands, saying hello to the patient in the next bed. One could have tagged the transmission of infection. Nobody was doing anything about it. We can do something about education but the primary responsibility lies with health and social care professionals.