Hospital boards and managers have to take hygiene and infection-control seriously, Minister for Health Mary Harney said last night.
She was responding to the publication of a review of hygiene standards at 51 public hospitals by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) which was unable to rate a single hospital as "very good".
Ms Harney said: "While hospitals generally performed well on hygiene in the service-delivery area, the results were poor on governance. This contributed to the disappointing overall results."
She said a quality-improvement plan now needed to be drawn up by all hospitals individually and collectively by the HSE.
Dr Mary Hynes of the HSE's National Hospitals Office said there was much for the HSE to study in the report and to improve based on its findings.
"We will be taking this report very seriously and working on those areas."
Dr Kevin Kelleher of the HSE's Healthcare-Associated Infection Governance Group, said the HSE had recently put in place a significant amount of strategic, structural and governance initiatives which may have been too late for the report.
He said he expected to see the HSE's Say No To Infection strategy reflected positively in the next HIQA review.
This five-year plan aims to reduce healthcare-associated infections by 20 per cent, reduce MRSA infections by 30 per cent and antibiotic consumption by 20 per cent.
Sheila O'Connor of Patient Focus said she was not a bit surprised at the findings as patients were coming to the organisation on a constant basis telling of how they had picked up healthcare-associated infections.
She said she was amazed the hygiene standards in private hospitals were not also being assessed, but the HIQA had no authority to inspect them.
Fine Gael's health spokesman Dr James Reilly asked what chance was there of tackling complex problems in the health service if the HSE and the Minister for Health could not get something as basic as hygiene right.
Labour's health spokeswoman Jan O'Sullivan said the report must prompt the HSE and the Minister for Health into immediate and effective action.
"The fact that not even one of our 51 hospitals met the highest standards is frankly shocking, while only seven hospitals were deemed to be good, with the rest fair or poor.
"The direct risks posed to patients by infections such as MRSA and C.difficile are simply too grave for the HSE and the Minister to ignore this problem.
"The Minister and Prof Drumm must get all hospital managers together to impress on them...that as managers they have a clear responsibility to make hospitals cleaner and safer for patients."
Sinn Féin's health spokesman Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin called on the Minister for Health and the HSE to urgently provide extra beds in hospitals to enable them to isolate patients with infections such as MRSA to prevent them spreading.