Another dose of bad NHS headlines for the Government because not all health trusts have completed the "deep clean" exercise ordered to combat MRSA by today's deadline. "Plan to deep-clean each hospital has failed," reported the Daily Telegraph at the weekend. But there is another way of looking at this story: 93% of trusts have met the deadline and, according to the Government, the rest are well on the way.
Now it may well be that the whole exercise was a bit of a "gimmick", as the Tories claim. And it was announced by Gordon Brown en route to the Labour conference last September, which makes me a little sceptical. But is it really the "shambles" the Tories describe it as with a 93% hit rate?
The episode raises a wider question about the Government's targets, which often generate bad headlines. Bad news drives out good, but ministers have a point when they say: "If you don't aim high, you don't achieve anything."
There was a good example in this month's Budget, when Alistair Darling found the money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. It's a fair bet that he would not have done so if Labour was not in danger of missing its goal to halve child poverty by 2010. Since the Budget, the opinon polls have been bleak for Labour. "We'll get zero credit for the anti-poverty measures," one Cabinet minister groaned. "But it's still the right thing to do."
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