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Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.
An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.
The inquiry report, published yesterday by Robert Francis, QC, included proposals for tough new regulations that could lead to managers at failing NHS trusts being struck off.
Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.
Related Links
‘Third World’ hospital may have killed 400
First big case of death by empty words
Multimedia
The inquiry in full
The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said there could be “no excuses” for the failures and added that the board that presided over the scandal had been replaced. An undisclosed number of doctors and at least one nurse are being investigated by the General Medical Council and Nursing and Midwifery Council.
Mr Burnham said it was a “longstanding anomaly” that the NHS did not have a robust way of regulating managers or banning them from working, as it does with doctors or nurses. “We must end the situation where a senior NHS manager who has failed in one job can simply move to another elsewhere,” he added. “This is not acceptable to the public and not conducive to promoting accountability and high professional standards.”
A system of professional accreditation for senior managers would be considered and the Mid Staffordshire trust might lose its foundation status.
Some NHS chief executives have received six-figure redundancy packages or moved to other trusts despite poor performance. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive at Mid Staffordshire, received pay rises that took his annual salary to £180,000, while standards at the trust deteriorated.
The Liberal Democrats claimed that he had also received a payoff of more than £400,000 after stepping down last March, though Mr Burnham said he had received “no more than his contractual entitlement”.
The Care Quality Commission, the NHS regulator, said that the trust under its new management was now “safe to provide services”. But it still had concerns about staffing, patient welfare, the availability and suitability of equipment at the trust, and how it monitored and dealt with complaints. The inquiry made 18 recommendations for the trust and the wider health service, which the Government accepted in full. They include a new review of how regulators and regional health authorities monitor NHS hospitals and a report on “early-warning systems” to identify failing trusts.
But the families of those who died or suffered poor care branded the inquiry a “whitewash” and repeated calls for a full public investigation. The Conservatives accused ministers of trying to blame managers rather than taking responsibility for problems with national targets.
Julie Bailey, who founded the victims’ campaign group Cure the NHS after her mother died at Stafford Hospital, said that the handling of the scandal was disgraceful and unacceptable.
“It is time that the public were told the truth about the very large number of excess deaths in NHS care and the very large number of avoidable but deadly errors that occur every day.”
The NHS Confederation, which represents health trusts, said: “The responsibility for the way this hospital was run rests with its board, management and staff but, as the report says, the framework of targets, regulatory systems and policy priorities it worked within are also very important.”
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! - Barry Goldwater
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Gold Medal Mess
Investors.com ^ | February 23, 2010 | INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Staff
Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 4:48:42 PM by Kaslin
Health Care: The premier of Newfoundland had heart surgery this month in Florida, bypassing his country's state-run system for American medicine. If Canadian care is so good, shouldn't he have stayed home?
'This is my heart, it's my health, it's my choice," said Danny Williams, who told his province's NTV news that the mitral valve procedure he had at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami "was not offered to me in Canada."
The Toronto Globe & Mail reported Tuesday that Canadian cardiologists have "fervently" countered that such surgery "is available in his home country."
But Williams, who maintains he has "the utmost confidence in our health care system," has said that "I had to leave the province because it was recommended to me by my own doctors that for this particular type of surgery I should leave the province."
It's unlikely we'll know all the factors that led to Williams' decision to be cared for in America. This we do know: Tens of thousands of Canadians buried in their country's sometimes deadly waiting lists seek treatment outside the border each year.
One group of patients that regularly travels to the U.S. for care is expectant mothers. In 2007, at least 40 mothers left British Columbia alone to deliver in America because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. That year, a Calgary woman had her quadruplets in the modest-size city of Great Falls, Mont., due to a shortage of neonatal beds in her hometown of 1 million.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-lmao-
Why do Socialists, Canadians & other Europeans. feverishly extoll the virtue's of their own healthcare systems as better than the USA. Then sneak over here & use our system over their own?
If you agree your system is vastly better... why do you increasingly find more ppl worldwide opting out of their own Socialized Healthcare systems to use ours? the poorly designed, grossly expensive, vastly flawed, greatly broken system. -ss-
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Don't be an ass Iris.....the whole point of this story is that it is one bad apple in the barrel. Are you telling me there isn't a hospital in the USA that has been badly run with less than good staff?
No one has ever suggested that US healthcare reforms should emulate the likes of this hospital in Stafford. It has been damned not because its part of a single payer system but because it was run badly, there was institutionalised bad care from the doctors and nurses and they were all more interested in making the numbers look good on paper and not actually doing their jobs.
Its not a single payer system that let those patients down, it was bad management and staff. You idiotic woman 'l'
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Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility
By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.
They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.
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Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan's, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.
While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.
On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.
Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.
"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."
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DaisyUnchained (2/25/2010)
the whole point of this story is that it is one bad apple in the barrel.
'50,000 people die from malnutrition a year in NHS hospitals,' claim Tories
By James Chapman
Last updated at 8:37 AM on 26th February 2010
Almost 50,000 Health Service patients a year are dying while suffering from malnutrition in hospitals in England, shocking figures suggest.
A Government report says official statistics which claim that just 239 people a year die from malnutrition in hospital are 'very misleading'.
It warns than 200 times as many patients die while not properly nourished.
Critics attacked ministers after it emerged that the report was delivered in August last year, but has only just been released.
Health campaigners have said that elderly patients in particular are often treated as 'second class citizens' on wards.
Families complain about meals being placed out of reach of incapacitated patients or taken away before they have had time to finish.
There are also concerns about the meals' quality, despite attempts by the Government to improve them.
And this week's shocking report into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where appalling care has been linked to the deaths of 1,200 patients, said some were left without food and water for days at a time.
More...Thousands of elderly people suffering with rheumatoid arthritis needlessly, say MPs
The latest end-of-year report from the Government's Nutrition Action Plan Delivery Board said 239 patients died because of malnutrition in English hospitals in 2007. Overall, 2,656 have died from malnutrition in hospitals and care homes since 1997.
But it added: 'We believe that these statistics can be very misleading.
'They represent less than 0.5 per cent of the number who died in hospital with malnutrition. We know that malnutrition predisposes to disease, it delays recovery from illness and it increases mortality.
Shadow health minister Stephen O'Brien described the new figures as 'horrific'
'It follows that the effect of malnutrition on mortality rates is substantially greater than the number reported to have died because of malnutrition.'
Tory health spokesman Stephen O'Brien said: 'The Government has sat on this devastating report since last summer - it is tragic to think that many more lives might have been saved if they hadn't deliberately delayed publishing it because of the embarrassment it causes them.
'It needs to free doctors and nurses from a culture of box-ticking and bureaucracy so that every patient can get the care they need in hospital.'
Malnourishment affects more than ten per cent of older people, according to the British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition.
Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age Concern and Help the Aged, said: 'Despite thousands of older people dying in hospital while malnourished each year, the failure of health ministers to lay out any concrete actions to tackle the problem will mean this scandal will continue.'
But Health Minister Phil Hope said: 'It completely misleads the public to compare the number of patients dying as a result of malnutrition with the number of people who have some degree of malnourishment, often as a result of ill-health.
'It does not necessarily contribute to or is a cause of an individual's death. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible.' ˜Inefficient hospitals would receive less money for operations and treatments under a Tory government.
Hundreds would have funding slashed to the levels of their most cost-effective counterparts. But critics said this would lead to the closure of many smaller units.
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Well, is it 50,000 or 239 dying in hospital? 'g'
Malnutrition is a can of worms as a patient in hospital or a care home who is not eating correctly for whatever reason, and I hate to be the one to break it to you Iris, but sometimes the elderly stop eating. Something about being old and losing the ability or desire to eat 'nods' But that all comes under malnutrition.
I will say that when I was in hospital following the bith of my son, he was in Intensive care for 4 days, and during that time, it was common that my lunch would arrive whilst I was in ICU feeding my son. The government/hospital have a policy that hot food has to be removed within 20 mins to avoid risk of bacteria growing in the cooling food. In may case, on each occassion I returned to my room to find dinner had gone, the nurses arranged for a cold salad or sandwhiches to be made and brought to me. Its a tough one to balance. Hospitals here have to have set meal times and if for whatever reason, you are unable to eat, the food is taken away.
Should a plate be removed when the patient is halfway through eating? Of course not. I have never experienced that scenario but I imagine it happens.
My ex's mother was in a US hospital and they forgot to feed her once. Completely forgot. So I guess all hospitals get it wrong at times.
But I'm not overly convinced by your figures and certainly, the defination of malnutrition is not down to simply not feeding someone correctly.
Lastly, the people quoted in your cut and paste are largely from the government opposition. In case you don't know, we are heading to a general election here and reports from one side or the other are flying hard and fast right now. Figures are being massaged and facts are dubious at times like this.
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Stafford Hospital caused ‘unimaginable suffering’ over 400 people died in their filth because of public health care
A lame ass bullshit comment, made by an ass that has no clue of what it speaks. That said, I would ask if any of these people blaming this on Public Health care, have any knowledge of how these hospitals, in this situation, are operated? The answer is an obvious, no. Even when a hospital of this sort, is funded by public money, it is operated by a private foundation. That is one part of it. Other parts are, everything from theft of funding, or people who refuse to pay their share into the system to keep it working. In the instances you reffer to here, do you have any idea of what is happening because of it? Also, do you have any idea how many hospitals, in the private system you praise so highly, have done a thousand times worse to their patients? This is a sad excuse for your attention grabbing.
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true, is really true, there would be little hope of advance......
Orville Wright
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Hmmmm, Grapes a bit on the sour side there Pita?
Never let it be said the facts got in the way.
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| Don't like truth do ya pita? -lol-
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it's pretty simple
if you're rich you can get great health care in the US
but unfortunately the healthcare issue is about providing care for the entire population not just the rich
which is why national health care is better...you get more health care services per dollar instead of having to go through a for profit insurer
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