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Northern European countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have resistance rates of less than 3%. 

9% of patients in NHS hospitals are suffering from an infection acquired while on wards on in surgery - This causes up to 5,000 deaths annually and costs the NHS £1bn   Reports from the National Audit Office state that at any one time, 9% of
patients in NHS hospitals are suffering from an infection acquired while on wards or in surgery. These infections affect 100,000 people annually, costing the NHS £1bn, and of greatest concern, causing up to 5,000 deaths.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that simple protocols can drastically reduce these figures. These range from simple day to day procedures for healthcare professionals (regular hand washing, the use of gloves, masks and gowns), through to institutional protocols for the sterilisation and handling of equipment, devices and laundry, and routine
isolating patients known to be colonised or infected by resistant pathogens, the implementation of more rigorous diagnostic procedures, and appropriate antibiotic use. 

Jonathan Angell comments; "All of these procedures help to reduce the spread of disease amongst patients in hospital care, and are promoted in the NHS, however, their impact seems to have been minimal - over the last two years, S. aureus resistance rates in the UK have shown linear increases. As with
the epidemiology of so many infectious diseases, once these pathogens reach threshold prevalence, the likelihood of any individual's exposure to them increases to a point whereby incidence spirals. In other words, prevention is by far a preferable option to resolution, a paradigm that the northern
European countries mentioned appear to have mastered, whilst Israel, Greece and the UK battle with prioritising their disease control efforts amidst soaring resistance levels". 

Cleaning standards in NHS hospitals are not entirely to blame - Northern Europe appears to be more committed to resistance surveillance than the UK   This has become apparent more recently with the public coverage of the cleaning standards within NHS standards. The concept of outsourcing cleaning
contracts came under heavy fire as a cost cutting measure not conducive to answerability or quality results. Indeed, these criticisms were partly responsible for the re-introduction of the matron figure in NHS hospitals, who is, amongst other things, responsible for improving wards, and preventing and controlling hospital acquired infection.

However, whilst hygiene procedures may appear to offer a proactive approach to containing the resistance threat, an apparently reactive strategy, surveillance, could enable the UK to make better use of the monies and efforts directed at reducing the threat of resistance to patients. Measurement is a key tool for any operation to be able to gauge the success,
efficacy or effectiveness of any tactic aimed at fulfilling a strategy. This is no less true of disease control, and the EARSS statistics offer up an interesting perspective on surveillance in the UK by comparison to the other
European nations surveyed. In absolute terms, the UK provided data from a large number of institutions, 969, only beaten by the Netherlands and Sweden (1093 and 1197 respectively). 

However, per capita of population, the UK provided the lowest proportion of responses: one institution per 61,556 individuals, by comparison to Sweden, that presented results from one institution per 7,414 of the population. Whilst this may simply be a coincidence, it may also be suggestive of a much
greater commitment to resistance surveillance in northern Europe, allowing the subsequent analysis of data that would allow for a much more proactive design of strategies for containing the resistance threat. Jonathan Angell comments: "Investment in surveillance is a long-term commitment, given that the return on investment could conceivably take some
time to become evident in improved results. As the NHS has increasingly become a political pawn in the debate over nationalised versus privatised health services in the UK, the prime priority has been on generating fast results, an aim to which analysis of waiting lists, staff retention and top
level spend are far more amenable. However, in the interests of controlling the costs, both physical and financial, of resistance, it may be imperative to set aside both time and money to investigate the possibility of benchmarking surveillance systems. However, the choice of role model needs
to be carefully identified. Countries such as Iceland, Denmark and Sweden already have low resistance rates, and hence do not face the same problems as the UK, Greece or Israel. These systems may instead be directed at maintaining consistently low resistance levels, rather than actively reducing high resistance rates. It may be far more useful, therefore to look
at countries such as Belgium, that have achieved a steady decrease in resistance levels over the past two years, or indeed Greece, which has managed to recover its resistance levels from over the 50% marker (2000 figures, compared to a rate of approximately 40% in the UK) over the course of a single year".