Wirral councillors to be given insight into scandal that engulfed Mid-Staffs hospitals (From Wirral Globe)

Wirral councillors to be given insight into scandal that engulfed Mid-Staffs hospitals

1:12pm Wednesday 13th March 2013 in News By Leigh Marles

Wirral councillors to be given insight into scandal that engulfed Mid-Staffs hospitals

Wirral councillors will receive a presentation tonight on the scandal that engulfed Mid-Stafforshire Trust Hospitals.

Between 2005 and 2008 conditions of appalling care were able to flourish in the main hospital serving the people of Stafford and its surrounding area.

A public inquiry, led by Robert Francis QC, found that up to 1,200 people died needlessly in Mid-Staffordshire hospitals due to poor care and bad management.

Wirral's Health and Well Being Overview and Scrutiny Committee will be given an insight into the findings of the inquiry.

The presentation has been requested by leader of Wirral Council Cllr Phil Davies, who said today: "I want to make clear I have absolutely no evidence anything even remotely comparable to Mid-Staffs could occur locally, but I thought it was important we made sure we understood the issues that led to this inquiry and learned any lesson we could from it.

"It was such a horrendous scandal I think we need to know what went on, and it may help us in providing the very best quality of care we can for the people of Wirral."

The report says the inquiry has identified numerous warning signs which cumulatively, or in some cases singly, could and should have alerted the system to the problems developing at the Trust.

That they did not has a number of causes, among them:

A culture focused on doing the system’s business – not that of the patients;

An institutional culture which ascribed more weight to positive information about the service than to information capable of implying cause for concern;

Too great a degree of tolerance of poor standards and of risk to patients;

A failure of communication between the many agencies to share their knowledge of concerns;

Assumptions that monitoring, performance management or intervention was the responsibility of someone else;

A failure to tackle challenges to the building up of a positive culture, in nursing in particular but also within the medical profession;

A failure to appreciate until recently the risk of disruptive loss of corporate memory and focus resulting from repeated, multi-level reorganisation.

The inquiry recommended that NHS staff should be put under a legal "duty of candour" to own up when mistakes affect patients.

Prime Minister David Cameron said recently he could understand public anger that, despite hundreds of unnecessary deaths, no one had been held properly accountable or punished for the failings that led to them.

Instead, some managers had been allowed to retire with their pensions or even promoted, he said.

He pointed out that the public inquiry had unearthed a “huge amount of information” about the scandal, which he suggested could be used by the police.

The report has been followed by growing political demands for police action.

The Prime Minister said: “We have to make sure that when a failure like this takes place there is proper accountability.

"There hasn’t been in this case. We need to put that right.”