The Telegraph: Mid Staffs NHS trust: Why
is nobody being punished for this disaster?
Between January 2005 and March 2009, the Mid
Staffordshire hospital was a terrible place, where patients were left lying for
hours in their urine and faeces. Those who tried to get out of bed and help
themselves often fell, and their injuries went unrecorded. You see, old people
drinking out of flower vases because nurse won’t bring water are of no concern.
Not if you want to hit your targets and
achieve the holy grail of Foundation Trust, which Mid Staffordshire most
definitely did.
I wrote a few
days ago:
Did things just happen or was there a master plan?
The NHS has been subjected to reform, re-reform and
re-re-reform over a number of years with little actual improvement in clinical
care to patients. Yet the bonus culture has led to side effects that were
normally the domain of bankers and financiers.
We have to remember that those high up were
carrying out the Government’s Master Plan. That was why they were not
sacked but promoted.
The Telegraph:
This is
the central question that the Francis inquiry addressed. Why did a hospital –
and, to a dismaying extent, other parts of the NHS – stop being sensitive to
patients’ distress? What about consultants doing their ward rounds at Stafford every day? Did none of them hear the cries and
smell the smells? What about Dr Helen
Moss, the hospital’s director of nursing from 2006 to 2009, the worst
period of neglect? Did she listen to Helene Donnelly, the shocked junior nurse
who outlined her fears about lack of care? Or did Dr Moss believe, as most NHS
managers seem to, that airing the hospital’s dirty linen in public was far
worse than not bothering to change the dirty linen your patients were lying on?
Warning!
You may want a gulp of gas and air before you read on. Yesterday, Dr Moss was
cleared by her professional regulator. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC)
said that Dr Moss had “no case to answer”. The NMC refused to say how it had
reached this remarkable conclusion, since all details of the case are
“private”.
So a
public servant who was in charge of nursing at a hospital that was complicit in
the deaths of 1,200 people is not accountable to the people who paid her wages.
If the buck doesn’t stop with Dr Moss, who the hell does it stop with?
Certainly not Stafford ’s former chief
executive, Martin Yeates, who cut
150 jobs to save £10 million at a time when there were already serious safety
concerns. An external report recommended that there was a case for disciplinary
action against Mr Yeates, but the hospital board decided on “pragmatic and
commercial grounds” to negotiate terms for an agreed departure. Therefore,
unlike many of his former patients, Mr Yeates left Stafford
hospital not in a wooden box, but with a £400,000 payoff.
Mr Yeates, who
resigned with a pay-off of more than £400,000 and a £1 million pension pot from
Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, told the inquiry
he was too ill to appear in person.
Bereaved
families said they were appalled to learn that Mr Yeates has now taken a job as
chief executive of a health charity, Impact Alcohol and Addiction Services,
which hold contracts with the NHS.<<<<
Do you need more proof that those involved
were part of a master plan? Here they are in the Telegraph:
Cynthia Bower, who was head of the West Midlands strategic health authority at the
height of Stafford’s inhumanity, dismissed the hospital’s alarmingly high death
rates as “a statistical blip”. Satire lay down and died the day Ms Bower was
appointed chief executive of the Care
Quality Commission. If you wanted to stop a tragedy like Mid Staffordshire
happening ever again, would you really choose a woman who failed to notice the
abuse at Mid Staffordshire?
Just for good measure, Sir David Nicholson, who also ran the West Midlands strategic health authority, is now chief
executive of the entire National Health Service. Small world, isn’t it? A
former Communist, Sir David is said by critics to be the perfect man to ensure
that Stalinist central targets are met, whatever the cost may be.
……What about the midwife
who told the Today programme on Tuesday that “you are penalised for taking time
to care”.
First Class Clinical Care:
I think that the wonderfully clear language of the
NHS’s founders, expressing a profound moral good, has been replaced by
management jargon of providers and drivers. That change is not cosmetic. Ugly
language has created ugly thinking, with behaviour to match. Too many people
going into a British hospital will encounter first-class clinical care in
third-world conditions.
But really:
Dr Chris Turner told the Francis inquiry that when
he started work at Stafford A&E in 2007, the place was “an absolute
disaster”. It was so bad that no one could remember what good looked like. The
overworked staff were constantly threatened with losing their jobs if they
didn’t get patients through the department
within the four-hour target. So when John Moore-Robinson was admitted after a
cycling accident, he was swiftly diagnosed with bruised ribs and sent away with
some painkillers. John died a few hours later from a ruptured spleen, which
doctors could have spotted if they’d given the 20-year-old the tests he needed.
So there you have it, master plan or not, patients
died unnecessary and those that comply with the Governments plan cuts and
targets get promoted.
Medicine as I know no longer exists in many
complying hospitals.
Please don’t cry!
© Am Ang Zhang 2012
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