Mid-Staffs scandal: new duty to report deaths

After years of successive governments rejecting it as unnecessary, there will now be a statutory duty of candour.

In the government’s response to the Mid-Staffordshire inquiry report hospitals and care homes will have to inform people if they believe treatment of care has caused death or serious injury. This will reinforce, we are told, the recently introduce contractual duty.

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This was an important element of what happened at Mid-Staffs. Plenty of people knew what was going on but kept their heads down or were bullied for trying to speak up.

And on whistle-blowing, the government has reiterated its ban on gagging clauses that seek to prevent NHS staff from speaking out on issues such as patient safety, death rates and poor care.

One point not raised was the role of the legal profession the Francis inquiry highlighted the case of trust lawyers who did not reveal problems at the hospitals because of their duty to protect their clients.

The message from today’s response is there needs to be a culture of compassion. To this end, NHS-funded nurses will spend up to a year working on the frontline as health care assistants. This will be a pre-requisite for receiving funding for their degree. Almost all trainee nurses will be affected

This, of course, deals with concerns over reports of nurses failing to care for patients with compassion and goes back to the debate about the way nurses are trained through degree courses with less time on wards.

And there will be minimum standards training for healthcare assistants.

Today the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was not just that 50 warnings were missed at Mid Staffs, it was that nobody did anything about it.

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