The Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, yesterday described the abominable diagnosis of patients at Stafford sanatorium as "ultimately a internal failure". This misses the point. For one thing, Stafford is not the usually NHS sanatorium that has put patients" lives at risk in new years. Basildon and Colchester hospitals were additionally detected to have jeopardised reserve in 2009.
What is more, Mr Burnhams efforts to solitary confinement this mess indicate an rejection to face up to the scale of the complaint that has been revealed. The disaster in Stafford is not usually the story of one really bad run hospital, but the disaster of a regulatory complement that did small to receptive to advice the warning until really late in the day. From 2005 to 2008 Stafford sanatorium was judged by regulators and the Government to be behaving well. It upheld most inspections and the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust even completed substructure status, presumably the benchmark of excellence.
Video: Calls for open inquirt at Stafford Yet as yesterdays eccentric inform on Stafford by Robert Francis QC outlines, the sanatorium was, during this time, drastically slicing staffing budgets and withdrawal patients to decay in contaminated sheets. How did the inspectors miss this? The inform says the hospitals government was pre-occupied with cost-cutting and assembly wanton targets set by Whitehall. But so too, it would seem, were the regulators. The certitude appears to have been judged on the peculiarity of the change piece rather than the peculiarity of caring offering to patients.
The regulators not usually incited a blind eye to the cost cuts, they appear to have rewarded the Trust for it. It is loyal that the Healthcare Commission, did, in the end, receptive to advice the warning over Stafford after being alerted to higher than common genocide rates. But that does not forgive the actuality that it along with alternative monitoring bodies longed for the complaint for years, during that hundreds of patients died needlessly. The NHSs regulators obviously need to renovate their own procedures.
As for ministers, rather than attempting to benefaction what occurred in Stafford as an removed e.g. of bad practice, they should inspect how their own targets contributed to the exaggeration of caring on the ground. Lessons will never be learnt whilst the authorities demand on burying their heads in the sand.
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