Francis Report: Update and Response

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and his obvious commitment to improve the culture of tackling poor care in the NHS; there is plenty of common ground between us. We endorse the principles laid out in Sir Robert Francis’s new report and we will work with the Secretary of State to get new safeguards on the statute book in the remainder of this Parliament, as he requested.

It was the Labour Government who, in 1998, introduced the first legal protection for whistleblowers in the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, reinforced in the NHS constitution in 2008. Sir Robert’s new principles build on those foundations. We thank him and the review team for their work and praise every whistleblower who has had the courage to come forward.

Our shared aim must be to create a climate in which every NHS worker feels able to raise concerns and feels confident that they will be listened to, that appropriate action will be taken and that they will not face mistreatment as a result. Sir Robert’s report will help achieve that. We particularly welcome the call for whistleblowers worried about losing their jobs to be offered alternative employment and for training in whistleblowing for all staff. Those measures are overdue. Will the Secretary of State say more about how Sir Robert’s principles will be enforced across the NHS and about the timetable for implementation? Will he confirm that they will apply equally to all providers of NHS services, including voluntary and private providers?

That brings me to an issue of major substance not covered in Sir Robert’s report. As he points out, his remit did not apply to any form of social care. That is a major concern, given that it could be argued that some of the poorest care provided in England today is in social care settings or in people’s own homes. Only at the weekend, a BBC investigation found that one in five care homes for older people is failing to meet standards for safety. Should we not today, across this House, establish the firm principle that Sir Robert’s recommendations should apply equally to all places where people receive care?

Let me turn to the recommendation for an external organisation that staff can approach for advice and support. In response to the first Francis report in February 2010, I established an expert group to update whistleblowing guidance. It reported in June 2010, and the Secretary of State’s predecessor announced plans for a “safe and independent authority” to which staff could turn when their organisations were not acting on concerns. Will the Health Secretary say why that has not progressed since then and assure us that there will be no further delays now that Sir Robert has reinforced that recommendation?

Although I believe that the Secretary of State’s commitment to improve the culture in the NHS is genuine, he will no doubt be concerned by Sir Robert’s findings that it might have got worse in recent years. In his report, he said about the cases he examined:

“Many were relatively recent or current. This is not about a small number of historic high profile cases from a time when organisations might argue the culture was different. We had a significant number of contributions about cases in 2014.”

The report specifically references figures from the latest NHS staff survey, which shows that reports of bullying have increased from 14% of staff in 2011 to 22% in 2013. Over the same period, the percentage of staff who feel able to speak out about poor care or to report errors or near misses has fallen from 98% in 2011 to 94% in 2013. Those figures suggest that things are getting worse, not better. Will the Secretary of State explain why he thinks that is and whether he will investigate the reasons further? That underlines the importance of any moves to improve the culture being introduced in the right spirit and being supportive rather than punitive, so that they do not reinforce the wrong culture and have the opposite effect to that which the Secretary of State is obviously trying to achieve.

At the weekend, the Secretary of State proposed fines and jail sentences for failure to be open about poor care. Although we support his zero-tolerance approach, is he certain that how this is perceived on the ground will not create a climate of fear and have the opposite effect?

Those concerns also apply to the new inspection regime introduced since the Francis report. In advance of today, I was contacted by a whistleblower who works in a hospital about a Care Quality Commission inspection planned for later this month and about the growing practice of hospitals running mock inspection days in advance of the CQC’s arrival, as schools have come to do with Ofsted. The whistleblower’s letter states:

“I enclose a document that invites us for a mock inspection to show us what to do and say when the CQC comes. Is this the correct thing to do? I think not. I cannot reveal my name as I would be instantly dismissed. Can you help?”

I am sure that the Secretary of State will be as concerned as I am to hear that and I will forward the information to him this afternoon.

I turn now to the Secretary of State’s update on the Francis report on Mid Staffordshire. Both sides of this House supported Sir Robert’s original recommendations and we give credit to the Secretary of State for making significant progress with their introduction, but gaps remain where progress has not been made and that is a concern when standards overall in the NHS are recorded to be falling, not rising.

In particular, there is a long-standing need to reform the system of death certification which goes back to Dame Janet Smith’s inquiry into the Harold Shipman murders. I took a personal interest in that as a Minister on the back of concerns raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne)and James Purnell, the former Member for Stalybridge and Hyde. I legislated for reforms of death certification in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, which made provision for the independent scrutiny by a medical examiner of all deaths that are not referred to the coroner.

Following successful pilots, Sir Robert Francis reinforced Dame Janet Smith’s recommendation. Dr Suzy Lishman, the president of the Royal College of Pathologists, says that introducing these reforms will

“improve patient care whilst reducing harm and saving money”.

It will therefore be a cause of great concern to a great many people, not least the families of the victims of Harold Shipman, that those reforms appear to be stuck in the long grass. Chris Bird, whose mother Violet was one of those victims, recently told the “Today” programme that

“it is criminal that the Government is stalling on implementing something like this that could save lives.”

I have been informed by senior officials in the Secretary of State’s own Department that he personally is holding up this reform. Can he say whether that is true, and if so why? If it is not true, which I am prepared to accept, will he today set out a clear timetable for the introduction of this vital reform?

Alongside that, we need better arrangements in hospitals for reviewing case notes when patients have died, as the Secretary of State mentioned in his statement. Over the weekend, the Government announced plans to introduce an annual review from a sample of patients. Although that will help us to develop a more accurate measure of avoidable deaths than mortality rates, does the Secretary of State think it goes far enough? Should not the NHS learn from all serious failings? Will he give consideration to our suggestion that every death in hospital should be subject to an appropriate level of review?

We welcome the renewed focus on staff numbers since the Francis report, but we also remind the House that in the first three years of this Parliament almost 6,000 nurses were lost and, with record numbers of people in hospital, nurse-patient ratios have not kept pace with demand and there are fewer nurses per head of population now than in 2009-10. One of the problems with having made so many permanent staff redundant is that, post Francis, recruitment has been heavily reliant on agency staff. As Robert Francis warns today, that has made it even harder to get the culture right. We welcome the Secretary of State’s recent focus on nurse numbers, but will he concede that it was a mistake to cut staff so heavily? Will he back Labour’s plan to bring down the agency bill by recruiting 20,000 more nurses?

We welcome the progress made at some hospitals in special measures, but may I caution the Secretary of State on his use of statistics? Is he aware of the graph on page 8 of the Dr Foster report, which shows that mortality rates at the Keogh trusts fell faster between 2006 and 2010 than between 2010 and 2014? There was never a tolerance or denial of high mortality, as he seemed to suggest in his statement.

On openness and transparency more broadly, the Secretary of State will be aware that the King’s Fund delivered a damning verdict on the Government’s reorganisation, concluding that it had damaged patient care. That is consistent with a survey of NHS staff, which found that 69% said the reorganisation had harmed patient care, with only 3% saying it had improved. It is suggested that the Government’s own risk register on the reorganisation warned that reorganising the NHS at a time of financial stress would damage front-line care. So that any future Government can learn the lessons of the past few years, will the Secretary of State publish the risk register, as recommended by Sir Robert Francis?

In conclusion, as I have always said, the lessons from Mid Staffordshire need to continue to be learned if the NHS is to be what we all want it to be: the safest and best health care system in the world. The Secretary of State has today taken some important steps towards that goal, but I hope he will respond fully to the serious questions I have raised.

[Mr Hunt]

I welcome the broadly constructive tone that we have heard today. May I say, in that spirit, that I hope that that represents a change in substance from some of the other exchanges we have had on these topics? The right hon. Gentleman tried to vote down the legislation that set up the new chief inspectors and he opposed the holding of a public inquiry into Mid Staffs. If we are to have constructive agreement across the House, I do think we need to agree on substance as well as on tone. Let me just take the individual points he mentioned.

We are completely committed to death certification. That was recommended in the wake of the Shipman inquiry. The right hon. Gentleman’s Government took a very long time to do anything on this and we have been trying hard to do it. It is a complicated thing to get right. On the question of looking properly at avoidable deaths, I just want to say this. It is very difficult, when one looks at case notes, to work out whether a death was avoidable or not, but we think we have a methodology to do that. It is more difficult to relate that to individual trusts, but we want to try to achieve that as well. I was disappointed at the weekend that when we announced that, his response was that it was unambitious. Two weeks earlier, he had published Labour’s 10-year plan for the NHS, which did not actually mention reducing avoidable deaths at all. What we are proposing is the most ambitious thing that any health care system has proposed anywhere in the world, and I hope it will have his full support.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about not generating a climate of fear, he is absolutely right; it is really important, in getting the culture right, to make sure that people are supported to speak out and that there is not, as an unintended consequence, the kind of bullying and intimidation that Sir Robert says is all too common today. I suggest to him that one of the reasons for that climate of fear has been over-dependence on top-down targets as a way of running the NHS. That is what has created the fear in managers that sometimes has led them to treat their staff in the wrong way. What would be very constructive would be a recognition from Labour that that top-down targets culture did go too far, and that we need to rely on transparency as a way of improving performance as a much better tool than endless new targets.

In anything we do—this is something else where I agree with the right hon. Gentleman—we must look very closely at making sure that we learn these lessons in the social care sector as well. That is particularly clear when we look at the scandal of what happened in Rotherham. That is why, when we introduced the new CQC inspection regime following the original Francis public inquiry, we did not just set up a chief inspector for hospitals but set up a chief inspector for general practice and for adult social care. We are now getting the same Ofsted-style transparent rankings of how good care is in care homes, and indeed in domiciliary care. I know that he, like me, is concerned about 15-minute care visits. I think those inspections will help to root out those problems.

With respect to nurse numbers, I really do think that is something on which, if the right hon. Gentleman wants to be constructive, he should commend the Government’s efforts. We have 8,000 more nurses in our hospital wards than we had four years ago. Of course, as a short-term response a lot of hospitals are employing nurses through agencies. That must only be a short-term response. We need proper long-term commitment to institutions, which we do not get with agency staff, but I commend hospitals that have said, “While we try and get enough staff in place for the long term we are not going to wait, because we need to make sure that patients are safe today.” They want to do what it takes to do that.

Finally, on the risk register, I simply remind the right hon. Gentleman that when he was Secretary of State he blocked the publication of the risk register. As a Minister, he said:

“This would inhibit the free and frank exchange of views about significant risks and…management, and inhibit the provision of advice to Ministers.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 1192W.]

More broadly, I just want to say this. There are many patients and whistleblowers looking at today’s exchanges and wanting to see constructive agreement on the way forward. I think we can get a measure of that. What they say they want is not just words, but actions.

As we put staff and patients first in England, will Labour do the same for patients in Wales and today commit to a Keogh review of high mortality hospitals, commit to a chief inspector of Welsh hospitals and commit to protect staff who speak out in Wales, as we want to do in England? Will he commit to putting right a top-down culture that prioritised the needs of the system over the needs of individuals? Will he, as we do, recognise that that is always the danger of treating the NHS as a political possession and not as a service for patients? Patients must always come first. Staff who want to do the right thing for patients should always be heard. Our NHS deserves nothing less.