The Killing Fields
If you have £1.50 to spare this week - do yourself a favour and buy a copy of the latest Private Eye - because it has an outstanding analysis of the Mid Staffs Inquiry.
Here's an extract - with some more to follow later in the week:
RETURN TO THE KILLING FIELDS
A chronicle of deaths foretold
Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive who refuses to resign, once joked that Andrew Lansley's disastrous NHS reforms were "so big, you can see them from outer space". On that basis, the Mid Staffs scandal is so rotten you can smell it from outer space.
When the Bristol heart scandal whistleblower Dr Steve Bolson was asked in 19998 how to avoid future disatsers in the NHS, he said simply: "Never lose sight of the patient."
Thirty-five babies died in Bristol due to substandard care over a four-year period, and the unit was dubbed "The Killing Fields" by stafff (as revealed in Eye 793).
A decade and a half later, Robert Francis QC has found that 1,197 people died at Mid Staffordshire hospital between 1996 and 2008, 492 of those deaths happening between 2005 and 2008.
How could the NHS, with record funding, published death rates and armies of regulators lose sight of so many patients, some of whom died in appalling conditions? And who is responsible?
Francis provided detailed answwers to the first question and completely ducked the second"
Now the language may be uncompromising, but so it should be - because what happened at Mid Staffs is truly shocking and it's simply not good enough that no one within the NHS takes responsibility.
