Investigation into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Quality of care and patient safety in the UK: the way forward after Mid Staffordshire.

In the past decade, quality of care and patient safety in British hospitals have become the focus of increasing public, professional, political, and regulatory concern. The 2001 inquiry into paediatric cardiac surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary concluded that the Department of Health was unable to respond to an issue of quality of care, even though the Department of Health accepted that ultimat...

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Commentary MID STAFFS: DISASTER BY NUMBERS (OR ‘HOW TO CREATE A DRAMA OUT OF A STATISTIC’)? Summary: The campaign about poor care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

The campaign about poor care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust culminated in a statutory public inquiry. There were both qualitative data about poor care and quantitative data about mortality rates. The campaign focussed initial press coverage on the excess mortality figures with reports talking about hundreds of “unnecessary deaths”. This paper looks at the basis for those figures and ...

NHS Values, Compassion and Quality Indicators for Relationship Based Person-Centred Healthcare; Comment on “Morality and Markets in the NHS”

The paper by Gilbert et al. should be on the table of every politician and National Health Service (NHS) manager in the run up to the general election, when the NHS is at the hustings. They have raised profound moral dilemmas of the internal and external market in their present form, such as the practicalities of distributive justice and the enhancement of autonomy – to which are added the pres...

Kim Holt: Pet hate is bullying.

In this BMJ Confidential (BMJ 2014;349:g7093, doi:10.1136/ bmj.g7093) Kim Holt said that, if she could be invisible for 24 hours, she would like to attend the discussions at the Department of Health on the Francis review. In editing the piece, we mistakenly referred to this as being the Francis inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, which was chaired by Robert Francis and publishe...