NHS: Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Earl Howe Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)]

My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for his excellent and incisive introduction to the debate, it is right for me to begin by reiterating the Government’s apology to the patients and families of Stafford Hospital for their suffering and for the way that the system allowed such horrific events to go on unchecked and unchallenged for so long. It is also right to remember that the vast majority of staff in the NHS are dedicated and committed to providing high-quality and compassionate care for patients. I, for one, have much admiration for the work that they do.

We are very grateful to Robert Francis QC and his team for their hard work. It is now our responsibility to use these findings to improve the NHS and the way that we work. We are currently giving careful thought to the key messages in the report and reflecting deeply on what we need to do. I regard this debate as an important ingredient in that process. I listened particularly to the salutary warnings from the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in this area.

The overriding theme of the report is about culture and the need for everyone across the health and care system to reflect on the report’s findings and recommendations and act to challenge and change the culture of the NHS to place patients and compassionate care at its heart. We are absolutely clear that this report needs to be a catalyst for change. We need to ensure that the quality of a patient’s care is given as much weight as their clinical treatment.

We are also in a far better position than before to prevent the sort of catastrophic failures of care seen at Mid Staffs because we now have a system which is working together to protect the patient in a way that did not happen before. Francis’s report outlines the serious consequences that occur when regulators do not communicate with each other properly and work in silos rather than in partnership. The reforms will enable us to allow for stronger and better regulation. From April 2013, Monitor will be the sector regulator for healthcare in England, and with the Care Quality Commission it will jointly license providers of NHS-funded care. Both have new duties to work more closely together and promote the interests of people who use healthcare services. The Care Quality Commission will have a new chief inspector of hospitals with powers to ensure that the system acts quickly to tackle unacceptable care. We are currently considering Francis’s specific recommendations on regulation in more detail, including their legal and financial implications. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that we have not rejected Francis’s recommendations to merge Monitor and CQC; that is still being considered.

We intend to provide an initial response to the report by the end of this month. The intention is that it will be a collective response across the system to demonstrate that we are working together with partners about the way in which we are doing that. It will focus on themes rather than being a line-by-line response to each of the recommendations. It will reflect the importance of the focus on culture and patient voice. It will begin to demonstrate that national partners, including the Department of Health and arm’s-length body partners, are acting together and taking action to ensure a greater focus on quality of care as well as quality of treatment, greater clinical input into policy making and a closer connect to patients. The whole system needs to put patients at the heart of what it does above all else.

In Francis’s letter to the Secretary of State, he states that the failings at Mid Staffs were,

“primarily caused by a serious failure on the part of a provider Trust Board”.

My noble friend Lady Tyler was right that the role of the trust board should not and cannot be underestimated. The board is key to ensuring that staff have the right support to be able to provide the very best care for patients. Board members need to provide good leadership and be able to model compassionate care so that it can be felt throughout the organisation. Members of the board therefore have an integral and challenging role in making sure that quality and safety is at the forefront while ensuring the care is patient-centred.

It is not surprising that the theme of safety has been prominent in this debate. Patient safety is paramount, but managing safety and developing a culture around this is a real challenge given the number of people the NHS treats on a daily basis. We are looking at how we need to do things differently. The patient safety expert Don Berwick will review our approach to patient safety and advise on how we can create the zero-harm safety culture that Francis was talking about and indeed, Cure the NHS, the patient group instrumental to ensuring that Mid Staffs was looked at in the first place, has also championed ideas on this.

It is clear from this report that during previous times of change in the NHS patient care and safety have suffered. What is also clear from the Francis report is that the system needed to be restructured precisely because patient safety was falling through gaps. I take the point made by a number of noble Lords about regulatory burdens, and we have commissioned a review by the NHS Confederation to consider how bureaucratic burdens on providers of NHS care can be reduced. The focus of the review is to consider how to reduce the burden of inspection and data collection on the providers of care so that they can focus more on the delivery of safe and effective compassionate care. That is why one of core objectives for the NHS Commissioning Board, as set out in the mandate, is to ensure the NHS provides safe care for patients, and it will be developing a new patient safety strategy to deliver on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Patel, talked about safety to a large extent and referred to Don Berwick’s work. The national reporting and learning system, as he knows, is now owned by the NHS Commissioning Board and allows the board to fulfil its legal duty in the 2012 Act to establish and operate systems for collecting and analysing information relating to the safety of the services provided by the health service. I think that is integral to its role. Don Berwick will review our approach to patient safety and the Francis report, and his job is to advise the NHS on the delivery of a sustained and robust patient safety culture.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, to whom I listened with great care, spoke very appropriately about people recommending a hospital to their relatives. That was a point well made. The friends and family test, which has been designed, is a simple and comparable test that provides a mechanism to identify poor performance. It is designed to encourage staff to make improvements where services do not live up to expectations. It should prove a useful mechanism.

The noble Lord, Lord Patel, asked in what respect the work of the chief inspector would impact on the CQC. The CQC has already said that it will move to a differential approach to inspection, with the better use of experts and with more attention paid to what patients say. The chief inspector post will focus this work so that performance is better understood and more easily identified and then acted upon quickly, which is particularly important.

The noble Lord, Lord Rea, spoke about whistleblowing. The Government’s reforms will deliver an emphasis on local clinical leadership and oversight, clinically led commissioning, greater transparency on outcomes, and oversight by local health and well-being boards and local Healthwatch. These reforms will make it much less likely that trusts will either want or be able to behave in a way that does not promote the highlighting of concerns or issues by staff, patients or the public. In turn, that should promote a culture where concerns are not just raised but acted upon.

This theme was picked up by my noble friend Lord Ribeiro. We recognise that there is work to be done to ensure that all staff are empowered to speak out and protect patients without the fear of victimisation for doing so. The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, reminded the House of her championing of a duty of candour. We are looking very carefully at that recommendation.

My noble friend Lady Tyler made the very good point that board members have to be engaged on this and to the fullest extent. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has written to all trust chairs highlighting the seriousness of the report and asking them to hold listening events with all staff to talk about the lessons that we can learn from Francis.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, emphasised the important role of managers, and I listened with equal respect to my noble friend Lord Eccles on that score. The Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care recently published national standards of behaviour and competence and a code of conduct for top NHS managers. I believe that patients and the public expect them to embrace those standards and indeed to live by them.

The theme of leadership was picked up by many noble Lords. Good leadership in the NHS embraces many things such as compassion and care and places quality and safety at the heart of all decisions. Leaders are needed at all levels. We are doing more to ensure that all staff have the opportunities to become leaders or to demonstrate leadership skills in their existing roles. The government reforms will deliver an emphasis on local clinical leadership and oversight, as I have mentioned.

My noble friend Lord Cormack and the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, also picked up the theme of leadership. The Leadership Academy is one organisation that has been established to train and develop new leaders and to run a number of core programmes to support clinicians, nurses and managers in leadership roles. I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, will take comfort from the fact that, as we consider Francis’s 290 recommendations, we are engaging with a range of key stakeholders, including the professional bodies, such as the royal colleges, to identify what more we need to do in response to Francis, including the values that pertain to good leadership.

We will consider very carefully the recommendations of the inquiry in the area of nurse training. We are particularly keen to establish whether more vocational ways of becoming a nurse can enrich the nursing workforce while maintaining the high academic standards that modern nursing requires. I say to my noble friend Lord Willis that we want to be guided by the profession. The country’s top two nurses, Jane Cummings and Viv Bennett, will do two things in this area: they will make sure that recruitment to university undergraduate programmes is based on values and behaviours, as well as technical and academic skills, and will work with national organisations to agree stronger arrangements to ensure effective training and recruitment.

My time is up, although I have much more to say. If noble Lords will allow, I will follow up this debate with letters to those noble Lords whose points I have not had time to address. Meanwhile, once again I thank all speakers for some extremely important contributions, which will in form the Government’s thinking over the weeks ahead.