Name and shame! Truth must come out vows Jeremy Hunt after report reveals baby deaths NHS cover-up

New chairman of the Care Quality Commission says that his organisation is still “not fully set up” to inspect hospitals.

NHS officials responsible for a suppressing an investigation into a hospital where mothers and babies died should be named and shamed, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.

Names of those accused of a cover-up were removed from an independent report into the Care Quality Commission inspection of the University Hospitals Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust.

But Mr Hunt said that neither he, nor the chair of CQC had wanted the names to be redacted and may now ask the Information Commissioner to rule on the decision.

“There should be no anonymity, no hiding place, no opportunity to get off scot free for anyone at all who was responsible for this,” he said.

Mr Hunt apologised on behalf of the Government and the NHS to the families of patients who had died at the hospital, because of failings in its maternity care.

“What happened at Morecambe Bay is above all a terrible personal tragedy for all the families involved.” he said, condemning a “culture” of putting “defensiveness and secrecy” above patient care.

However, there was widespread condemnation of the decision of the CQC to redact names from the independent report, which was carried out for the watchdog by consultants Grant Thornton. The chair of the CQC, David Prior, is understood to have received legal advice that naming names would be a breach of the Data Protection Act.

However, Ben Bradshaw, Labour MP for Exeter, said that the names should be released under the act’s public interest exemption rule.

“There are clear and explicit exemptions to the act when it comes to ‘protecting members of the public from dishonesty, malpractice, incompetence or seriously improper conduct or in connection with health and safety,’” he said.

A source told The Independent: “The Secretary of State has asked that the CQC look into these allegations of a cover-up and report back to him including the issue around naming individuals and also whether additional action needs to be taken against people named in that report…We need to check exactly what the advice was that the CQC were given as to why they couldn’t publish the names.”

Under the report commissioned by the CQC and carried out by management consultants Grant Thornton, the watchdog has been accused of quashing an internal review that uncovered weaknesses in its processes.

It accuses the CQC of deleting the review of their failure to act on concerns about University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, where police are investigating the deaths of at least eight mothers and babies.

The report details one official saying that he was ordered by a senior manager in March last year to destroy his review because it would expose the regulator to public criticism.

“We think that the information contained in the report was sufficiently important that the deliberate failure to provide it could properly be characterised as a ‘cover-up’,” the review said.

David Prior, the new chairman of the Care Quality Commission said that his organisation is still “not fully set up” to inspect hospitals.

“We were not set up then and we’re not fully set up now to investigate hospitals,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. “Our job is to inspect hospitals and we were not doing it properly.”

The maternity unit at University Hospitals Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust is facing police investigations over the deaths of at least eight mothers and children.

Mr Prior, who took charge of the CQC four months ago added: “I have known for the last three months that we were not fit for purpose at all when it came to hospital inspections and that we had to fundamentally change the way we’re doing it.”

The CQC’s former chair Dame Jo Williams, resigned in September and its chief executive Cynthia Bower left in February. Mr Prior said the former board had been “totally dysfunctional.”

Inspectors who had no background in healthcare – including former members of the fire service – had been deployed on short hospital inspections, he said, adding that inspection would now be carried out by “a dozen to 15” experts over the course of a month.

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, which serves 365,000 people in South Cumbria and North Lancashire, was given a clean bill of health by two regulators in 2010, despite a spate of serious problems being recorded dating back at least two years.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman insisted the Government had already taken “very clear, strong action” to reform the CQC.

“What occurred was… deeply disturbing and appalling,” the premier’s spokesman said. “What he thinks is absolutely the right thing to have done is to have changed the organisation in the way that has been done.”

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said the CQC had been “radically overhauled” as part of efforts to embed a “culture of care” in the health service.

“A new senior leadership team, changes in the structure that that team has overseen,” he said.

“Does the CQC need a radical overhaul? Does that need to be seen through? Yes.”

Last night the CQC refuted that the errors had led to any deaths in the maternity wards but apologised.  It said: “The example of how an internal report was dealt with is evidence of a failure of leadership within CQC and a dysfunctional relationship between the executive and the board. There is evidence of a defensive, reactive and insular culture that resulted in behaviour that should never have happened.

“The findings of this report are in tune with previous reviews and have many echoes of the Francis report in that it reveals a lack of communication between organisations and a failure to listen to people using the services. Since the events detailed here, we have completely changed the executive team and have made substantial changes to the board.

“We have completely rewritten our strategy with input from the public, providers and our own staff. We are now putting that strategy into practice and will radically change the way we inspect hospitals, starting this autumn.”

Parents whose children died at the Trust’s Furness General Hospital have been campaigning for a full independent inquiry into to the failures at the hospital.

James Titcombe, whose baby son Joshua died at the hospital in 2008 when staff failed to treat an infection, told The Daily Telegraph that the alleged cover-up was “frankly rotten”.

“If you cannot trust the health care regulators, the very people who are there to ensure minimum standards of safety, who can you trust?” he said.

The official who wrote the original, damning internal report, told the independent review that he felt he had been pressured into covering up damaging evidence.

He “said he felt very uncomfortable about the apparent weight that was being given in the meeting to the potential media impact and reputation damage his report findings might cause CQC…In effect he had been asked to omit anything that could be considered damaging for CQC.”

Peter Walsh, chief executive of Action Against Medical Accidents, which has supported parents who lost children at the Furness General, said the review “underlines the need for a fully independent and wide-ranging inquiry into how, even in the aftermath of Mid Staffordshire, the regulatory system utterly failed to protect patients and sought to cover-up.”

Campaigners are concerned that the decision to shield those responsible for the alleged cover-up will mean they are free to apply for other jobs within the health service.

The CQC asked the consultants not to name the individuals referenced in the report. Mr Prior said that those primarily responsible had left the CQC, but Peter Walsh, chief executive of the Action Against Medical Accidents said that those responsible should not have been allowed to leave “with an unblemished record”.

“They should have been suspended pending an investigation,” he told The Independent. “Failure to do that means that the people responsible for the things related in this report are completely free to apply for jobs at other NHS bodies or regulators with no suggestion that they’re in any way unsuitable, which I think is an irresponsible way for a regulator to act.”

The CQC, which faces at least 30 civil negligence claims, is likely to be subject to a public inquiry.

Source The Independent