This weekend, the excellent health editor of the Sunday Times, Shaun Lintern, revealed how NHS England has been suppressing damaging reports from national clinical audits it funds.
‘The lesson from every major patient safety scandal is that failing to confront uncomfortable truths only allows unsafe care to persist,’ the paper quoted Jeremy Hunt as saying, adding that the NHS ‘should be championing independent scrutiny and transparency – not creating the impression that reputational management is taking precedence over patient safety.’
Unable to control what the NHS does, managers naturally concentrate on controlling how it’s perceived
It’s more than an impression. National audits are being muffled and constrained, their authors forbidden from making recommendations to the hospitals in which they find problems. They are barred from contacting the media, or even from repeating recommendations when they discover that previous similar suggestions have been ignored.
Demands that the NHS adopt the airline industry’s approach to safety aren’t wrong, but have become incantations masquerading as ideas: like saying the NHS should be more efficient, without explaining how that should be achieved. Few people offer specific ideas, fewer offer good ones, and fewer still accept from the start that even the best ideas come with costs and unintended consequences.
