Health Secretary Hunt’s attempt to turn the report on the ‘breakdown in healthcare’ at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust into an attack on the NHS as a whole were condemned as a ‘disgrace’ yesterday.
Some details of the recommendations of the two-year Francis report into the Stafford Hospital catastrophe have been leaked.
The inquiry probed a period between 2005 and 2009, when hundreds died as a result of failings in treatment at the hospital.
In 2009, the outgoing Healthcare Commission produced a report showing there were up to 1,200 excess patient deaths between 2005 and 2008 at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust-run hospital.
That damning report showed that the Trust board had been concentrating on making £10m funding cuts, so as to make the hospital ‘financially sustainable’ in order to achieve foundation trust (FT) status.
The hospital already had 100 nursing vacancies but chose to reduce nursing staff by a further 160 from 2005.
They had a policy of replacing trained nurses by untrained health care assistants (HCAs). There was no proper consultant surgical cover at night.
It was patients’ relatives who raised a hue and cry over the treatment of their loved ones.
When the scandal was exposed in March 2009, the spotlight fell on the head of the West Midlands health authority, David Nicholson, who has since been knighted and is the current Chief Executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, and another senior manager in that region, Cynthia Jowett, who subsequently became head of the Care Quality Commission (CQC.)
The incoming Tory government set up a public enquiry chaired by Robert Francis, QC, which took evidence from 290 witnesses over 139 days and cost £13m.
His report records a ‘culture of fear’ as managers pursued targets and bullied staff, so that adhering to four-hour targets in A&E became more important than actually caring for sick patients.
So explosive are the report’s findings that its presentation to the public has been repeatedly delayed, and will only be produced after review by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Hunt however, writing in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, blames the deaths at Mid Staffs on lack of ‘basic human compassion’ among NHS staff.
BMA member Anna Athow told News Line: ‘Of course to cut costs and sack staff is to destroy high quality care and put patients’ lives at risk, but Hunt calls for more of the same.
‘Then he claims that the key issue at Mid-Staffs was not the money, it is a disgrace.
‘He mendaciously states that the coalition government is protecting the NHS budget when he knows perfectly well that the £20bn QIPP cuts are being rammed through the health service, forcing massive bed closures and staff redundancies.
‘The message from Hunt is loud and clear – managers must make the cuts, or they will be sacked, while, when health-care fails as a result as it undoubtedly will, it is the fault of “uncaring” staff.
‘It is high time the trade unions organised a general strike to defend the NHS and bring this coalition government down now.’
