United Kingdom

Patient deaths scandal shakes National Health Service

Published on 7 February 2013 at 15:44

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“Patients across the country are unsafe because of endemic failings that caused one of the worst scandals in NHS history,” began The Times on its front page following the publication of a report on the treatment of patients at the state-run Stafford Hospital, where up to 1,200 patients died between 2005 and 2008 due to poor care by medical staff. The inquiry detailed cases in which patients were left so thirsty they drank from vases, and where receptionists rather than nurses were left to decide which people needed priority treatment. As news of the report broke, emergency investigations into five further hospitals were ordered due to their unusually high death rates.

Doctor and broadcaster Phil Hammond, writing in The Times, said it was time to end the “collusion of anonymity” in which medical staff dodged responsibility for mistreatment, and called for senior staff to be held accountable. He also criticised the report’s author, lawyer Robert Francis, for failing to squarely apportion blame to those responsible.

In 2006, when the NHS ran up a half-year deficit of £600 million, its chief executive Nigel Crisp resigned. Yet when up to 1,200 people die unnecessarily in a single hospital, no senior manager resigns. Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, was in 2005 the head of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, the body supposedly responsible for supervising standards at Stafford Hospital. He should step down.

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