NHS: Keogh Review

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

We will see the Chief Inspector of Hospitals picking up the baton, as it were, from Sir Bruce Keogh, whose way of working in this exercise has been very instructive. His judgments were based on talking, not just to a few people in the trust, but to patients, a wide range of staff and, in some instances, people outside the trust. I am sure that Sir Mike Richards, the new chief inspector, will want to learn from that. It will be up to the CQC to decide whether this will be institutionalised. Its methodology is evolving. The hospital aggregate rating system will have a role to play in systematising the evaluation of performance and in any future instances of very poor care we will no doubt see a level of transparency from the CQC which we have, perhaps, not had before. However, I would not want to commit the CQC to reporting annually to Parliament in a particular way. It will report annually to Parliament but it is largely up to it how it does it.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, we welcome the drive to improve quality in these trusts and across the NHS, based on the eight ambitions for improvement held in the report. In the Statement read by the Minister, the Secretary of State said:

“In some cases, trust boards were shockingly unaware of problems discovered by the review teams”.

Surely the boards were in receipt of data on quality. If not, why not? If so, why was action not taken? What attention is being paid to issues of trust board governance and its support and development?

[Earl Howe]

We will now see follow-up action by the CQC, not least in the area of trust governance where the quality of that governance has been called into question by Sir Bruce. That will be done rapidly. It is by no means the case that governance is defective in every trust, but question marks have been placed on some and it is important that assessments are made, not just by the CQC, but by the Trust Development Authority and Monitor as the two bodies responsible for overseeing the provider section. It may be that the CQC will be asked to carry out further work, but we are looking, for the time being, to the TDA and Monitor to do that.