Hunt: Strike off those responsible for Stafford scandal
Jeremy Hunt calls for staff who contributed to the poor standards of care at Stafford Hospital to be struck off.
The health secretary said the failure to hold individual doctors, nurses and managers to account for conditions that could have led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of patients was “one of the most shocking things about this”.
Mr Hunt told BBC1’s Andrew Marr show: “I think this is a problem, I think accountability is very, very important.”
Asked whether staff responsible for the situation at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust should be struck off, he said: “Absolutely. The question I ask as Health Secretary is why is it we have a system where potentially 1,000 people have lost their lives because of bad care and no-one’s brought to book.
“But I also don’t want to make the mistake of thinking this was all about bad apples.”
The question I ask as Health Secretary is why is it we have a system where potentially 1,000 people have lost their lives because of bad care and no-one’s brought to book. Jeremy Hunt
An inquiry into what went wrong at the trust concluded that a “disaster” in standards of basic care and medical treatment could have caused up to 1,200 premature deaths.
Both Mr Hunt and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg have said police should follow evidence arising from Robert Francis QC’s inquiry.
Mr Clegg said: “My own view has always been that there are parts of poor and criminal behaviour in our society where we are sometimes not tough enough.
“White collar crime, we are not as tough as the Americans in saying if someone has committed a white collar crime and others have had to pick up the pieces – we have seen the anger, quite legitimate public anger about the terrible failings in the banking system – I think quite understandably many people say when are people going to be held to account for this?
“But who is held to account, for what offence, is of course at the end of the day a matter for the police.”
Mr Francis said there were failings at every level of the NHS and that the culture among healthcare staff must change.
He said: “What we need to avoid is yet another wholesale reorganisation of abolishing organisations and creating new ones.
“This is about how people behave when they go to work and their ability to raise concerns and be honest about what’s going on in their hospitals.”