Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Newdick and Danbury1 rightly point to the depressing fact that not much seems to have changed since the Kennedy report2 following the Bristol scandal. The Bristol inquiry concerned the standards of care applied in the treatment of a relatively small group of patients, namely babies with serious heart problems, devastating and tragic though the consequences of failure were in those cases. The exposures at Stafford showed that many of the issues seen in Bristol persisted and affected many more patients. Doctors in Stafford showed themselves as reluctant to engage in clinical governance as their Bristol colleagues had been. Arguably ‘club culture’ existed in the managerial sector as well as the medical profession.
Newdick and Danbury's argument that the deficiencies exposed in Stafford were not unique to that trust has been strengthened since by the Secretary of State's expressed concern that standards at some other hospitals are ‘mediocre’,3 and the strong echoes of Stafford discovered at a number of other hospitals by among others, the Keogh Review.4
A number of professional staff at Stafford must not only have realised what was happening to patients, but have dissociated themselves from any personal responsibility. Why did the duties imposed on healthcare professionals have so …
Footnotes
Competing interests None.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Development of a theoretical framework of factors affecting patient safety incident reporting: a theoretical review of the literature
- Barriers and facilitators to deprescribing of cardiovascular medications: a systematic review
- Triage in preventive child healthcare: a prospective cohort study of care use and referral rates for children at risk
- Qualitative exploration of patient and healthcare professional perspectives on barriers and facilitators to foot self-care behaviors in diabetes
- Priority setting and personal health responsibility: an analysis of Norwegian key policy documents
- Competence, professional self regulation, and the public interest
- Kennedy refused to read the General Medical Council's reports
- Regulating and legislating safety: the case for candour
- Barriers and facilitators to treatment among patients with newly diagnosed hypertension in Nepal
- Getting back to basics: on the need to define care in analyses of care