Safety, Transparency and Openness in the NHS

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

Today I am announcing a package of measures to boost safety, transparency and openness in the NHS.

In March, I announced a new ambition to reduce avoidable harm in health care by half, thereby saving 6,000 lives. A new campaign—“Sign Up to Safety”—will be launched today to help achieve this ambition. The campaign will call for everyone working in the NHS to listen to patients, carers and staff, learn from what they say when things go wrong and take action to improve patient safety. Every health care organisation will be formally invited to sign up to the campaign and commit to delivering a safety plan that will contribute to the new ambition. The safety plans will be reviewed by the NHS Litigation Authority, and if the plans are robust and will reduce claims, trusts will receive a financial incentive from the NHS Litigation Authority to support implementation of their plans. This is just one way that we can tackle some of the financial costs of poor care.

In the Government’s response to Sir Robert Francis QC’s “Public Inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust”, we pledged to create a hospital safety website for the public. As of today, NHS Choices will provide key hospital-level patient safety data in one place which means the public can see how hospitals compare in terms of safety across seven key indicators—including reporting culture, hospital infections and cleanliness, response to patient safety alerts and health care staff recommendations to their friends and families about the organisation they work in. In our response, the Government also said that hospitals needed to be more transparent about staffing levels, and for the first time the new hospital safety website will tell the public whether a hospital has achieved its planned levels for nursing hours.

Finally, I am announcing an independent review into creating an open and honest reporting culture in the NHS chaired by Sir Robert Francis QC, who chaired the landmark inquiry into the poor standards of care in Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. The review is being established to provide independent advice and recommendations on measures to ensure that NHS workers can raise concerns with confidence that they will be acted upon, that they will not suffer detriment as a result and to ensure that where NHS whistleblowers are mistreated there are appropriate remedies for staff and accountability for those mistreating them. The review will consider the merits and practicalities of independent mediation and appeal mechanisms to resolve disputes on whistleblowing fairly. It will do this by listening to and learning the lessons from historic cases where NHS whistleblowers say they have been mistreated after raising their concerns and by seeking out best practice.

The safety campaign that we are launching today, together with what is now an unprecedented and world-leading level of transparency and openness, will help to create the right conditions needed to harness the commitment of everyone in the NHS to deliver the best and safest possible care.