I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has a longer history in this House than I do, and indeed a longer future. He is right that finance was put far above patient care. People in Staffordshire are still astonished that the trust was ever granted FT status. I asked Robert Francis himself, and he said that he had no idea how, in the climate my hon. Friend has just described, that failing trust, which was bankrupt at the time, was able to shed staff for no clinical reason at all in order to achieve FT status, and that FT status was granted while all those problems were lurking beneath the surface. I would welcome any intervention from an Opposition Member to say why that was signed off.
The Conservatives are not alone in saying that Labour created a culture of targets in the NHS that led to thousands of unnecessary deaths at Mid Staffordshire hospital. It is also being said by the World Socialist Web Site and by independent charities such as Macmillan Cancer Support, which says that the trust prioritised its FT application over providing high-quality care that put patients first. Let us be clear what that means. The management of the Mid Staffs trust shed 150 nurses, many of them my constituents; it sacked them from their jobs, which were clearly vital, given the appalling care that followed, simply in order to hit financial targets. Those financial targets were not due to budget constraints—to be fair to the previous Labour Government, they did not reduce the NHS budget in Staffordshire. The job cuts were made deliberately to meet an aspirational organisational form. What a strange position to arrive at in the 21st century, where management think that it is acceptable to shed necessary nursing jobs simply to achieve an organisational form, as though that is in some way more important than serving the health needs of patients.
The Francis report is so important because it states for the first time: that the patient, not a foundation trust application, should come first; that there should be a statutory duty of candour, rather than a culture of cover-up; that feedback from patients should be valued and listened to, not ignored, as was the case in Stafford; and that hospitals should be rated, as Ofsted rates schools, and publicly assessed so that patients can make informed choices about their care.
The figures show that NHS care has changed for the better just one year on from the Francis inquiry. The 14 hospitals now in special measures are slowly being turned around, with 650 extra nurses and nursing assistants hired, strong leaders installed and 49 board-level managers replaced. Some 2,400 extra hospital nurses have been hired. Since May 2010, 3,300 more nurses and 6,000 more clinical staff are working on NHS hospital wards overall and—this is the crucial figure—nearly 1.6 million patients have given direct feedback on what they thought about their treatment through the friends and family test.
There is clearly a shift of priorities going on within the NHS, which is to be welcomed, but it would never have happened were it not for the Francis inquiry—an inquiry, of course, that would never have happened under the previous Government. I repeat my earlier point about the importance of not protecting the reputation of the NHS as an institution, but above all else focusing on the care of the patients that it exists to serve.
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