NHS has ‘hampered’ inquiries into failures
NHS hospital bosses are complicit in a culture of “complacency, avoidance, denial and cover-up”, a patient safety expert has told MPs.
A government committee heard how inquiries into NHS failures were routinely hampered by “foot-dragging” tactics from NHS and hospital leaders just a day after the Infected Blood Inquiry report was published.
Miles Sibley, the co-founder of the Patient Experience Library, which collates various surveys, reports and hospital data into one place, told the health select committee about the tactics leaders within the NHS employ to delay inquiries.
When asked why he thought it took so long for patients and loved ones to get answers, he said: “I can’t talk for inquiry processes but in terms of the time it takes for these things to come to inquiries, I think partly it’s because of these cultures of complacency and avoidance and denial and cover-up.
“Foot-dragging is a tactic, and when you read inquiry reports, you see examples of this all the way through,” he said.
“Things like case notes being mysteriously lost. It’s a tactic.
“It goes back right to the start where people start to raise concerns and find they’re hitting a brick wall almost straight away.”
Such themes were central to the report into the infected blood scandal, which claimed the lives of 3,000 people who had received contaminated blood while under NHS care.
Sir Brian Langstaff’s report found there had been a “chilling” cover-up by officials.
“The NHS and successive governments compounded the agony by refusing to accept that wrong had been done,” he said of the multitude of failings highlighted in his report.
Theresa May, the former prime minister who established the inquiry, told the House of Commons, the report had “highlighted what is a devastating and abject failure of the British state”.
“Medical professionals, civil servants, politicians – all of whom felt their job was to protect their own reputation rather than to serve and look after the public who they were there to serve,” she said.
Mr Sibley told the health select committee how delay tactics, cover-ups and the dismissal of patient voices had been hallmarks of multiple inquiries into NHS scandals.
In the last two decades, there have been several inquiries, including into maternity failings at Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent, the Francis Inquiry into the failings at Mid Staffordshire, where hundreds of patients died because of negligence, and there are ongoing inquiries into serial baby killer Lucy Letby and more maternity failings in Nottingham.
Mr Sibley said patients were often the last to be listened to and their experiences dismissed as “anecdotal evidence”.
“When people talk about patient stories being anecdotal evidence that’s a kind of shorthand for saying their subjective, emotional, irrational, unreliable and basically shouldn’t be given too much credence.
“The term anecdotal evidence is not just dismissive, it is contemptuous of people’s experience. And I personally would like to see it never mentioned again in healthcare,” he said.
He said there had been multiple studies, including from Healthwatch England, into the “muddled roots for finding a way through complaint systems” with patients unsure who or where to turn to.
And that after surmounting the dismissive attitudes, when things “start to get really serious, [they] encounter denial and obstruction”.
“This happens to regulators as well. When the CQC [Care Quality Commission] went into East Kent… they were met with an aggressively hostile response,” he said.
“CQC investigators were forced to sit in a corridor and wait for 45 minutes after the supposed start time of their meeting as a tactic.
“What we do see time and again, is patients and harmed families having to speak up sometimes for years before finally being heard,” he added.
Quoting from Baroness Cumberlege of Newick’s 2020 review into medicines and medical devices safety, which looked at harms caused by pregnancy test drug Primodos, epilepsy drug sodium valproate and vaginal mesh, he said: “The patient experience must no longer be considered anecdotal and weighted least in a hierarchy of evidence based medicine.
“That’s something that the whole of the NHS needs to hear and act on.”
