I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) on his thoughtful contribution to the debate. We all owe it to the people of Stafford and those round about, all of whom depend on Mid Staffs, to ask the Secretary of State to guarantee that nothing and no one is allowed to use the horrors that occurred as an excuse to close the hospital or to run it down. That would punish the local people, the potential patients, and the good staff at the hospital. I hope he is willing to make whatever organisational changes—extra cash, or new ways of financing parts of the health service—are necessary to make that guarantee to the people in that area.
I started off has Health Secretary fully in favour of transparency. My last job before I became an MP was working for the local government ombudsman. It was my view, and it remains my view, that the best way to deal with anything that has gone wrong is to stand up and say, “Sorry, I got it wrong.” However, there is a problem. We are asking people in the NHS to operate in two different worlds. If something goes wrong in the hospital, the GP’s surgery or the clinic, we say: confess straight away. That is one world—the official world. People then get in their car, drive out of the car park to go home and bump into another car. What happens? Their insurer says, “Whatever you do, don’t accept any responsibility.” We need to recognise the clash of different worlds that people live in.
When the excellent hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Sir Richard Shepherd) introduced the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 to protect whistleblowers, I made sure that the Labour Government supported it, and that the provisions covered the national health service. There were those who did not want it to cover the NHS. I am delighted to say that I anticipated that some might want to have disappearance clauses in contracts—gagging clauses—and issued a circular that prohibited them. Any health body that has inserted such a clause is breaking the terms of the circular that was sent out in my name in 1999.
I also established the Commission for Health Improvement. It was intended to monitor and improve standards, and it was the first time in the history of the national health service that such a body had been set up. At that time, there was no machinery in the NHS for identifying good or bad practice, or for promoting good practice more widely and eliminating poor practice. I also required all health boards and chief executives to be responsible for the quality of treatment and care. No such obligation had been placed on them before, and that was a step in the right direction.
The hon. Member for Stafford rightly said that if transparency is to be based on experience and on data, those data have to be fair. We cannot have a situation in which someone who performs regular, straightforward surgery is compared favourably with someone who treats people in desperate circumstances and therefore has a greater chance of the operation or treatment going wrong. Everyone in the medical profession has got something wrong, and some have done so quite a few times.
If we are to have transparency in the provision of services to NHS patients that are paid for by public money, that transparency must apply not only to the NHS providers but to any other franchised provider of services. I know from experience that, when our lot were selling off a GP practice in my constituency, we were told that we could not find out the terms of the contract because it was commercially confidential. If we had been able to see the contract, we might have spotted that it enabled the contractor to leg it if things got difficult, which is what it duly did.
However keen Government Members might be on involving the private sector—I freely admit that I am not, but they are—they must ensure that patients and others are not denied information on the ground of commercial confidentiality. I strongly support the idea of making whistleblowing a duty, and that duty of candour
must apply to any private sector provider. We cannot have them hiding away behind their private profit-making efforts. We must also ensure that, when anything goes wrong, the Secretary of State will answer to the House of Commons. We do not want anyone coming along and saying, “It wasn’t me, guv, it was the commissioning board wot got it wrong.” We must make it absolutely certain that our national health service is responsible to us here.
My final point is that I am sick to death of what is happening at the Whittington hospital. In order to qualify for trust status, it is being told to reduce the ratio of nurses to patients, yet it is already one of the five safest hospitals in the country.
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