I believe that the Francis report is becoming a major turning point in the life of our national health service, which is one of our great institutions and is probably treasured above every other institution that the British people hold dear. The Francis report has moved the NHS from being a rather impenetrable bureaucracy into something that is much more fallible, human and compassionate.
The Francis report highlighted the failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and stated that they were very much the result of a failure of leadership. As Francis said:
“The patient voice was not heard or listened to, either by the Trust Board or local organisations which were meant to represent their interests. Complaints were made but often nothing effective was done about them.”
Damningly, he found:
“There is no evidence that the substance of any complaint was ever raised with the Board.”
I shall come back to that point later. He also said:
“Such an approach completely ignored the value of complaints in informing the Board of what was going wrong, and what, if anything, was being done to put it right.”
As Members have been saying, this reflected a culture of denial about failings and complaints not just at Mid Staffs, but across much of the NHS. We know that the problems were wider than this one trust. In a report last year the parliamentary and health service ombudsman, whose office is the responsibility of the Committee that I chair, the Public Administration Select Committee, carried out a survey of 94 trusts from across England and found that only 20% of boards were reviewing learning from complaints and taking resulting action to improve services; less than half were measuring patient satisfaction with the way complaints were handled; and less than two thirds were using a consistent approach to reviewing complaints data. One other finding, from memory, was that only 2% of trusts were considering complaint handling as a strategic issue to consider during a trust board awayday.