Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (Inquiry)

Ann Clwyd Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The Care Quality Commission has said that Stafford hospital is providing adequate care. There was a recent inspection to check up on it, and obviously more work needs to be done as it recovers from this. We need to be absolutely clear that nurses not only provide amazing care, but are also well trained and can carry out some quite complicated medical procedures, and they are proud of that. They are often—dare I say—better sometimes than the junior doctor at putting in the cannula or whatever. We should praise that and we should want to have professional nurses. The key thing that needs to change as we employ and train nurses is that we make sure that at the heart of their reason for wanting to do the job is not just access to the qualifications and the career, but a real belief in compassion and caring, and that it is a vocation.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Apart from addressing the training of nurses, we need nurses who do not mind wiping people’s bottoms or holding the sick bowl under somebody’s face, but there are not enough of those any more. I am glad that the Prime Minister talked about compassion and care. I have received more than 1,000 letters and e-mails since I first spoke out from people who echo some of the points he has made today and which we all know about as constituency MPs. There must be an opportunity for whistleblowers to act without fear of reprisal. There must be freedom for people to make complaints, to speak out and to say when they see that something is going wrong. I only wish that I had spoken out and shouted, instead of thinking that I was leaving somebody in the hands of professionals, which, I am afraid, did not extend to the care and compassion we would all expect somebody to be treated with in hospital.

I just wish to pay a quick tribute to the campaigners, as the Prime Minister has done. I pay particular tribute to Julie Bailey, whom I have also met. I have met dozens of those people, and I think we would all applaud their tenacity in speaking out and sticking to their guns. I look forward to helping to make the system better because, as the Prime Minister has said, we all love the NHS, but we know that there are systemic faults in it at the moment.

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Lady for what she says, and I am delighted that she is going to be helping us with this piece of work to really set out how complaints should be properly handled. I think she speaks for everyone when she says not only that she loves the NHS, but that when we see the best level of care handed out to loved ones, it is one of the most inspiring things in the world, and that is why it is so disturbing and so hurtful when we see poor standards of care and people let down. We have to get a balance right in this debate: we must continually and rightly praise nurses, health care assistants and doctors for the care and compassion they provide—for what they do every day—but we must marry that with a determination that where there is bad practice we should join them in pointing it out. There has been a culture of complacency that we have all been part of—MPs are to blame here, too—for too long.