NHS: Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, like others I congratulate my noble friend Lord Patel on initiating this debate. I declare an interest as a member of the General Medical Council, like the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar. That interest, of course, translates into a responsibility. So many organisations, including the GMC, have a responsibility to study Francis, to understand what went wrong, and to play their part in putting it right for other parts of the National Health Service. In particular, the GMC needs to consider its own leadership role in driving standards up; it must be not just the policeman but the coach of professionalism and high standards. It must address that tremendously dangerous disengagement from management that we saw illustrated and which defines professionalism, not as the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar did, but very narrowly as care of one’s own patient rather than responsibility for the whole clinical environment. One of the chilling things about Francis was how many people who were not bad people felt either disempowered or “aresponsible” in terms of what they could see going on elsewhere in the hospital.

The noble Lord, Lord Willis, said that as parliamentarians we had some responsibilities, too, in not having discussed the issues of values and cultures. We may not have spent many hours on that. However, we have certainly spent many hours on structures and funding systems—thousands of hours of debates in both Houses. I contend that much of the energy that has gone into reorganisations has sapped energy from the absolute fundamentals of what the NHS is about. Francis gives us the opportunity not to turn this into 290 new boxes to be ticked, but to look at the fundamental purpose and values of healthcare that need to be subscribed to, understood by and championed by those responsible for governance and professional leadership and those responsible as managers. I was brought into the NHS 30 years ago by a hugely talented and committed NHS manager, Alasdair Liddell, who died tragically and suddenly on New Year’s Eve last year. The commitment of managers to the values of the NHS, as well as to cost-effectiveness, efficiency and everything else, is hugely important.

There are other two things that I will say quickly about my first experience in the NHS in Bloomsbury. One is to echo what has been said about complaints. I chaired a complaints panel that looked at every complaint that came into those hospitals. It was a goldmine in improving service and efficiency. To ignore that goldmine is hugely damaging. There are very few heroes in the Francis report, but the complainants are heroes. They gave the opportunity to put things right beforehand.

Secondly, of course we have to look at death rates, but we have to look, too, at those doctors and whether they would recommend a hospital to their colleagues. We had a unit at UCL with pretty well the highest death rates in the country. It was the unit in which every doctor in London would have wanted their family treated, because it took the patients who would otherwise have gone to a hospice.