THE aftermath of the sentencing on Monday of Lucy Letby for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others at the Countess of Chester Hospital has thrown a searchlight once again on the role of privatising NHS managers, amidst the correct accusations that they ignored all warnings from medical staff that Letby was connected with the deaths.
They were too busy privatising the NHS to worry about patients being murdered.
At Letby’s trial, it emerged that senior doctors had warned for months that she was the only nurse present during the sudden deaths of premature babies in the neonatal unit, but she was not even moved from the ward until early July 2016 – a year after doctors had first alerted hospital bosses of a potential link between her and murder.
According to two consultant paediatricians, in July 2016 a hospital manager responded to an internal inquiry that confirmed the link between Letby and the deaths by dismissing it, saying there was ‘no evidence’ against Letby ‘other than coincidence’.
One senior doctor recommended bringing in the police only to be told that contacting the police would damage the hospital’s reputation.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, Dr Stephen Brearey, the lead consultant on the neonatal unit who was the first to carry out an urgent review into the deaths, said that concerns raised by doctors were ‘turned on their heads’ by managers. In fact, they were made to apologise to Letby.
He said this was a common experience in the NHS where, instead of acting on his warnings, he and his colleagues felt it was they who were under attack.
He said: ‘You go to senior colleagues with a problem and you come away confused and anxious because that problem is being turned in a way in which you start to realise they’re seeing you as a problem rather than the concern that you have.’
Dr Brearey insisted that the behaviour and accountability of senior officials needs to be regulated, saying: ‘Doctors and nurses all have regulatory bodies that we have to answer to, and quite often we’ll see senior managers who have no apparent accountability for what they do in our trusts, then move on to other trusts.’
He added: ‘You worry about their future actions and there doesn’t seem to be any system to make them accountable.’ They were too busy privatising!
Exactly the same culture of unregulated non-clinician managers and executives answerable to no one was uncovered by the public inquiry into the failures at the Shrewsbury NHS Trust which contributed to the deaths of 300 babies over a period of 20 years.
It found a culture of bullying, anxiety and fear of speaking out among staff as managers prioritised targets set by the government and increased productivity and privatisation at the expense of patient safety.
This culture has not just been allowed but actively encouraged by Tory governments, who use these unregulated NHS managers to keep doctors and nurses intimidated into silence over the horrific and dangerous conditions caused by decades of NHS cuts to budgets and staff, and privatisation.
In fact, they are acting under the instructions of the Tories to open up NHS hospitals to the privateers so as to undermine the foundation of a free health system and prepare the way for full, all-out privatisation.
All calls for regulations to be imposed on these managers from the BMA and public inquiries have been rejected by the Tories, including a recommendation to ban any manager sacked by one trust from moving on to another NHS job on the grounds that such a ban was ‘too complex to implement.’
However, regulation of hospital managers and executives alone is not the answer to an NHS that has been put under a state of siege by the Tories, where the lives of patients are very much secondary to the never-ending drive to cut spending and open the doors to the privateers.
There is only one way forward. This is to remove these privatising ‘managers’ and place hospitals under the management of doctors, nurses and representatives of the NHS trade unions whose only priority is to ensure the best health treatment for all.
The way forward is to force the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the billionaire bosses and bankers placing industry, the banks and the hospitals under the ownership, management and control of the working class, free at the point of use, for the benefit of the working class, the elderly and the youth.
Only a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy can provide all the funding and resources to ensure that the NHS meets the health needs of all.
