Rate my as a doctor, but don’t blame me for a service in crisis

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s plan to name and shame GPs who fail to spot cancer by placing a red flag next to their practice on the NHS website has been rightly slammed. However, MD is strongly in favour of patients and relatives rating their NHS care, and encourages his to do so. There is good evidence that people who have a good experience of NHS care, and feel listened to and included in decisions about their care, get better results. Putting this information in the public domain provides important feedback to the NHS and individual staff, and guides patients where to go to find kind, competent care.

Publishing patient experience information in real time, as many hospitals are starting to do, is a good smoke alarm to step in and stop poor care before too much harm is done, and a great was of praising excellent care. Some sites such as Patient Opinion allow you to have a conversation with a willing GP practice or hospital and try and sort out problems. In some instances, this has happened commendably quickly. On the website MD uses,

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Inquiring into the GMC

Jeremy Hunt has rightly ordered an inquiry into NHS whistleblowing, to be chaired by Robert Francis QC. He cannot hope to fulfil his promise of no more health service cover-ups without understanding why and how the numerous cover-ups in the past have happened. And this inquiry must reach every level of the NHS, to show how high up the chain the denial, incompetence, amnesia and wilful blindness has gone. MD has long since given up on the General Medical Council as having any meaningful role in calling doctors to account or protecting patients from avoidable harm. The Eye reported Dr David Elliman, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street to the GMC on September 30, 2011, alleging that he failed to act appropriately on whistleblowing concerns that might have prevented the death of Baby Peter Connelley. The GMC is still investigating. And the GMC is still pondering its initial decision not to hold an inquiry into the conduct of Dr Barbara Hakin, now deputy CEO of NHS England, in not responding appropriately to the patient safety concerns of whistleblower Gary Walker (Eyes passim). This referral is now two years old.

The overwhelming impression is

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NHS and Social Care need to be a single, joined up system. And the Ombudsman needs to own up, learn and apologize to the Titcombes.

The annual conference of the NHS Confederation is where politicians of all sides present their big ideas for health and social care. In the one before an election, there is usually tedious point scoring but this year Jeremy Hunt, Andy Burnham and Norman Lamb all agreed that the service faces massive challenges, that health and social care need to be joined up as a single system and – having just gone through the biggest reforms in NHS history – it will require further massive reforms to do this.

When the NHS was founded in 1948, half the population died before the age of 65. Now, the average life expectancy is 80, with the rich living 15 years longer than the poor and having 20 more years of healthy living. Inequalities in health and truly staggering. One in three children born today will live to 100, but one in four boys born in Glasgow still won’t make it to 65. One in three people will get cancer, one in three will get diabetes and

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Witness Statement from Dr Phil Hammond

I have been both a general practitioner and journalist for twenty years, breaking the story of the Bristol Heart Scandal in Private Eye in 1992 and giving evidence to the eventual Public Inquiry seven years later. Much of my journalistic work involves supporting and protecting NHS whistleblowers, while allowing their concerns to be made public in a way that could help protect patients from avoidable harm. One of the saddest elements about the high rates of death and brain damage for babies undergoing complex heart surgery in Bristol was that the problems were well known within the heart surgery community and regulatory authorities, and yet no-one – save for whistleblower Stephen Bolsin – saw fit to act.

Despite legislation to protect those who blow the whistle in good faith, I am not convinced that the lot of the NHS whistleblower has improved much over 20 years, nor that we have got any better at stepping in to protect patients from harm when concerns are raised. This is well documented in the recent Private Eye supplement, Shoot the Messenger. The Francis Inquiry may well find that NHS staff are now even less likely to blow

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