CQC: NHS Deaths Review

Mark Harper Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. I recognise the progress made in the Scottish patient programme, and particularly the inspirational leadership of Jason Leitch, who has done a fantastic job in Scotland and some very pioneering work.

The hon. Lady made some good points that I will take in reverse order. On whistleblowers, I asked Sir Robert Francis to look at this in his second report. He concluded that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to go back over historical cases, because the courts have pronounced and it is very difficult to create a fair process where legal judgments have already been made. However, I take on board what she says, and I do not think that that means that we cannot learn from what has happened in previous cases; they are very powerful voices.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right about near misses, and we will include that issue in the “learning from mistakes” ambition.

The hon. Lady is most right of all about people with learning disabilities. The heart of the problem is deciding when a death was expected and when it was unexpected. About half of us die in hospitals. As she rightly says, the vast majority of those deaths are expected, but when a person has a learning difficulty it is very easy for a wrong assumption to be made that they would have died anyway. That is a prejudice that we have to tackle, and one that Connor Sparrowhawk’s mother talks about extremely powerfully. We have to make sure that this is not just about lessons for the whole NHS, but particularly about ensuring that we do better for people who have learning disabilities.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on learning disability, for me the most chilling phrase in the foreword of the report was when Mike Richards and his team said:

“We found that the level of acceptance and sense of inevitability when people with a learning disability or mental illness die early is too common.”

Will the Secretary of State put on the record what Mike Richards says in the report, namely that there can be no tolerance of treating the deaths of people with learning disabilities with any less importance than the deaths of any other patient in the national health service?

[Mr Hunt]

I am happy to put on the record the fact that those words have the Government’s wholehearted support. I credit my right hon. Friend for his work leading the APPG. I commissioned the CQC report because a year ago we had a report by Mazars on what happened at Southern Health, which said that only 19% of unexpected deaths were investigated and that that fell to 1% for people with learning disabilities. That cannot be acceptable, and it is why it is so important that we act on today’s report.