I absolutely agree. This is about starting to identify the culture and values of the people we employ in the NHS, and making it clear that not only does everyone in the NHS have a duty to bring forward concerns, but that those concerns will be welcomed and acted on. I would like everyone in the NHS to have an individual to whom they can go and feel safe in raising their concerns. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point.
My hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson) has told me that he does not feel that he has been gagged, which is great, but there is still an important point of principle: as a PPS, he is not able to speak in this debate. We want everyone, from the very top of the NHS and the Department of Health, right through to the bottom of the system, to feel that they are fully free to raise any concerns they have, wherever they may be.
After the Bristol heart scandal, whistleblower Stephen Bolsin was asked how we could prevent this from ever happening again. He said:
“Never lose sight of the patient.”
His whistleblowing cost him his career. He first raised the alarm in 1989. His work over six years to raise his concerns remains one of the single most important improvement in clinical outcomes in the NHS—that is how important whistleblowers are to our system. Yet the scandals keep happening. Would it not be a tragedy if, five years from now, we were still saying, “We need to put patients at the heart of everything we do in the NHS”? It is time to make that happen.
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