by Peter Watt
One of the lessons of the Mid Staffs hospital scandal should be that those involved in the delivery of health care should show some humility. But humility doesn’t seem to be something that the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is familiar with.
Let’s face it, if a single hospital can be found to have between 400 and 1200 deaths caused by poor care between January 2005 and March 2009 then something has gone wrong. The fact that subsequently a raft of other hospitals are being looked at adds to the strong sense of a system that isn’t working. As David Cameron rather too eagerly reminded Ed Miliband at PMQs yesterday, this happened under a Labour government at a time of rapid growth in spending on the NHS. This wasn’t a time of cuts – quite the contrary.
The Francis report was a comprehensive review of what went wrong at Mid Staffs and its conclusions were damning. Blame was shared across a number of fronts:
- A bullying culture in the NHS so that those expressing concern were silenced and others were too fearful to speak;
- A focus on healthy finances rather than the health of patients;
- Regulators not regulating properly – in fact not noticing that anything was wrong;
- Managers not managing effectively;
- The disorganisation of reorganisation after reorganisation.
So there were plenty who should be a little humble from the Labour party itself to the department of health. But there is another group who need to take a good long hard look at themselves: nurses. Because one of the other key problems identified was that there were nurses who were not good enough.
Now this obviously does not mean that all nurses are poor or that they do not care about patients. I had a message from a friend the other day who had just finished a 12 hour nursing shift with only a twenty minute break. So there are thankfully plenty of dedicated, caring and compassionate nurses often working many long hours to ensure that their patients are cared for.
But what is also blindingly obvious is that a report into poor care that causes hundreds of deaths will find that some nurses got things badly wrong. And they did. As the Guardian reported of the Francis report:
