This evidence has also been submitted to the Registrar of the GMC requesting that the decision not to hold a public hearing into the behaviour of Dr Hakin be reconsidered. This application for a review of the case examiners’ decision is being dealt with by  Mr John Barnard at the GMC.

Submission to HSC for GMC Annual Review December 10 from Dr Phil Hammond and Andrew Bousfield

Bully for Hakin

Bullying is the cancer at the heart of the NHS. It stops staff, patients and relatives from raising concerns about their care, it destroys many that do and it allows political directives to be enforced on the frontline even when they’re unsafe or untrue, just to keep Downing Street happy. The only time politicians see the light is when they’re forced to in response to a disastrous public inquiry. On 6 February, David Cameron said of the Francis Report into Mid Staffordshire hospital; ‘You can identify in the report three fundamental problems with the culture of our National Health Service. First, a focus on finance and figures at the expense of patient care. He says that explicitly. This was underpinned by a pre-occupation with a narrow set of top-down targets pursued to the exclusion of patient safety or listening to what patients, relatives – and indeed many staff – were saying.’

These were precisely the reasons that MD and Eye journalist Andrew Bousfield referred Dame Barbara Hakin, now deputy chief executive of NHS England, to the General Medical Council. We alleged that she oversaw a ‘hit your targets or else’ policy when she was chief executive of

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Simon Says Yes

And so Simon Stevens, the global president of an American private healthcare firm, is to be chief executive of NHS England. Stevens is currently President of UnitedHealth’s Global Health division. The American Association for Justice – an international coalition of attorneys and law professors promoting a fair and effective justice system – ranked UnitedHealth as the eighth worst insurance company in the US. ‘Plagued by accusations that its greed has endangered patients. Physicians report that reimbursement rates are so low and delayed by the company that patient health is compromised. Money that should have been spent on medical treatment for policyholders has instead gone to the company’s former CEO, who faced criminal and civil charges for backdating stock options’1 One of Steven’s many challenges will be to prove the NHS is not going to be carved up for corporate profit. He has to be trusted to act in the best interests of patients.

UnitedHealth UK could certainly do with a boost. It recorded a £8.2m loss and a 27 per cent fall in turnover in 2012 – its eleventh loss-making year in a row. UnitedHealth Group is set to wind up its loss-making UK arm and ‘shift

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Hunt hunts Burnham

‘Shocking revelations on @andyburnhammps attempts to cover-up failing hospitals. We’re making sure this can never happen again.’ So tweeted health secretary Jeremy Hunt about his Labour predecessor on October 4^th, prompting a vociferous rebuttal and threat of legal action from Burnham. Hunt’s ‘apology’ was thus: ‘My tweet referred to revelations about political pressure on the CQC over the publication process for reports in failures of hospital care, and was not a suggestion that you personally covered up evidence of poor care.’ His tweet has remained up, despite Burnham’s insistence it be removed, and the ‘suing for defamation’ threat remains.

The Tories have targeted Burnham for a while. He’s been effective in exposing the organizational chaos that the entirely unnecessary Health and Social Act has visited on the NHS. Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS since 2006, was the one person who could have spoken up and derailed the reforms, but chose to remain silent as the bill passed and only now has declared that hospitals and GPs are being ‘held back from making changes that made perfect sense from the point of view of patients because they did not meet new rules on

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Justice for Robert Henderson

By far the greatest harm caused by the NHS is not the mistakes that it makes, but the fact that they are so often denied, dismissed, improperly investigated or covered up so that patients, or more often relatives, spend decades seeking the truth, accountability and apology.

The never-ending nightmare of Will Powell, father of Robbie, is a good example (Eyes passim) He’s spent 23 years, and all his savings, trying to get the truth about how and why Robbie died. He was promised a public inquiry, which never materialised, although he did make it to the European Court of Human Rights in 2000, which judged that ‘doctors have no (legal) duty to give parents of a child who died as a result of their negligence a truthful account of the circumstances of the death, nor even to refrain from deliberately falsifying records.’

More recently, James Titcombe has spent 5 years trying to get to the truth about the death of his son Joshua at Morecombe Bay hospital in November 2008. The coroner in Newcastle refused to open an inquest because he said Joshua died of ‘natural causes’, the trust did an investigation without interviewing the staff,

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