Patient Safety

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

What I will take responsibility for is agreeing to a public inquiry into what happened at Mid Staffs—something rejected by the Labour party—that has woken up the whole NHS to the need for safe staffing in all our wards. We are implementing the report and that will indeed be reflected in the nurse training numbers going forward.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

Basildon and Thurrock hospital was the first to exit the special measures regime after a number of years of failure. It did so because the leadership embraced what happened, was willing to learn the lessons from what went wrong and went out of its way to fix them. Far from being a naming, shaming and blaming culture, is it not the truth that my right hon. Friend is strengthening the culture of accountability in the NHS, which is as it should be?

[Mr Hunt]

Yes, and I would like to thank my hon. Friend for her superb work in supporting Basildon and Thurrock hospital through a very difficult period. I think that the chief executive there, Clare Panniker, is an exemplary one. She wrote an article in The Guardian pointing out that it is incredibly painful for trusts when they go into special measures, that it causes a lot of pressure in the local media, but that it also means that change can be made much more quickly when an urgency to solve these problems, many of which have been around for years and years, is created. I commend the staff of that hospital not just for coming out of special measures but for being rated “good” by the chief inspector of hospitals—a fantastic achievement.