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By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent  

A RECORD number of patients have died in hospitals and nursing homes after contracting superbugs, official figures released yesterday show.  

MRSA and Clostridium difficile were linked to more than 8,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2006, up from 5,300 the previous year.         

There were 6,424 deaths from C. difficile in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices - almost double the 3,719 in 2005. MRSA was responsible for 1,625 deaths, barely up from 1,621 the previous year.   

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, include a breakdown of deaths by location for the first time.

They show that the worst hospital for C. difficile deaths in England and Wales was the Royal United Hospital in Bath, which recorded 268 deaths from the infection between 2002 and 2006. Staff there were once described by Lord Mancroft, the Conservative peer, as being "grubby, drunken and promiscuous'' and the wards were "filthy and never cleaned''. The George Eliot hospital in Nuneaton, Warks, Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry and Leicester Royal Infirmary each had more than 200 deaths caused by the infection over the same four-year period.

Maidstone Hospital in Kent, which was involved in one of the worst outbreaks of C. difficile in the country when more than 90 patients died at three hospitals run by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, had 113 cases between 2002 and 2006.

With 94 cases, Derriford Hospital in Plymouth recorded the highest number of deaths from MRSA between 2002 and 2006. Over the same period, the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth registered 81 deaths from MRSA, Maelor Hospital in Wrexham had 79 and the Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Somerset, recorded 77.

More than 1,100 hospitals, hospices and nursing homes listed at least one death from C. difficile in the past five years and more than 900 had at least one death from MRSA.

The Office for National Statistics cautioned, however, that many of the hospitals that recorded large numbers of deaths from both infections were also more likely to have high patient numbers.

The data, collected from death certificates, also discloses only where patients died, not where they acquired the infections or where they received other treatment.

A spokesman for Help the Aged expressed concern at the variation between hospitals.