Francis Report

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Pressure on hospitals, and how we relieve it so that they can care for people properly, is the core of this debate. What we have seen under this Government is an ever-increasing number of frail, elderly people coming into hospital via A and E. The Secretary of State shakes his head, but Francis made specific recommendations on the care of older people in hospital. The point I am making is that under him the number of older people admitted to hospitals as emergency admissions has gone up significantly, and that goes to the heart of the issues raised by the Francis report.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

We have an excellent hospital in Salford—it is one of the best in the country—but we also have 1,000 people who are losing their care packages this year. We have pressure on Salford because Trafford has been downgraded and lost its A and E, and we are short of two A and E consultants—even Salford has a problem recruiting A and E consultants. Those are real concerns for people in Salford despite having one of the best hospitals in the country.

[Andy Burnham]

I hope that the Secretary of State was listening to my hon. Friend. The point I was making—he did not like it—was that there is plentiful evidence that the NHS has gone downhill in the 12 months since the publication of the Francis report. The chaos in A and E has increased, and pressure on mental health services has reached almost intolerable levels.

Trusts face great difficulties in recruiting sufficient A and E doctors—a central issue in the Francis report, as it addresses safe staffing numbers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I want to talk about the Francis report, which detailed failures that were a betrayal of NHS values—we have heard repeatedly about those failures in this debate—but before I do so I will speak briefly about NHS change day, which shows so much that is good about the values of the NHS.

This week saw the second NHS change day. It is a front line-led movement, the largest of its kind, with the shared purpose of improving health and care. Its mission is to inspire and mobilise people everywhere—NHS staff, patients and the public—to do something better together to improve care for people. Hon. Members have until 31 March to make pledges for NHS changes, and it may be that Ministers and shadow Ministers will want to adopt some of them. Some inspirational pledges have been made that are making a real difference to care. An example I like is the “Hello, my name is...” campaign by Dr Kate Granger.

In December 2012, Dr Kate Granger was herself an in-patient, and she noticed how infrequently health care professionals introduced themselves. She wrote:

“As a healthcare professional you know so much about your patient. You know their name, their personal details, their health conditions, and much more. What do we as patients know about our healthcare professionals? The answer is often absolutely nothing, sometimes it seems not even their names. The balance of power is very one-sided in favour of the healthcare professional.”

It might seem astonishing that a campaign to encourage health care staff to introduce themselves to patients is needed, but it is an important part of the change in culture that people are trying to bring about.

Some 390,000 pledges have been made for the second NHS change day. It will run to the end of March, so that figure might reach half a million. This is a very good movement inside the NHS to improve care, in addition to the important matters we are discussing today. It is valuable that NHS staff, patients and carers are making pledges to do just that.

It is clear that staffing is one of the most important issues in the Francis report. The report talks about

“a lack of staff, both in terms of absolute numbers and appropriate skills”.

A survey of nurses published by Nursing Times one year on from the Francis report found that more than half those surveyed believed that their wards remained dangerously understaffed. Indeed, 39% of those who responded warned that staffing levels had worsened in the past 12 months. Various numbers have been bandied about during the debate, but that is a key factor. Only 22%—a fifth—of the nurses surveyed reported an improvement. I think it notable that more than half said that their own wards were dangerously understaffed, because that is the same percentage as a year ago. If understaffing was identified as an issue in the Francis report, it is still an issue now.

I believe that one pledge that politicians can make to improve care in the NHS is a pledge to support the Safe Staffing Alliance. The fundamental standard is a ratio of no more than eight patients to one nurse; other key aspects of safe staffing are use of a management tool to work out the safe staffing levels and the publication of staffing levels so that they can be seen by patients and their families. Let me repeat what I have said to Ministers a number of times over the last year, now that they recognise that Salford Royal is an excellent hospital. Salford Royal works out minimum staffing levels with a management tool, and publishes actual versus planned staffing levels on whiteboards on the wards every day. Again and again, we hear about failures in hospitals that, like the failure at Mid Staffordshire, are related to understaffing and the awful position in which it puts nursing staff. In another debate on this subject, the Secretary of State said:

“Salford Royal is one of the best hospitals in the country and we should always learn from what it does”.—[Official Report, 19 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 1107.]

I hope that he will now start to take his own advice.

People in Salford were thrilled when Salford Royal’s chief executive, David Dalton, was knighted earlier this year. I believe that that was well deserved, because Salford Royal and David Dalton have done a huge amount to improve patient safety and reduce mortality. In its report “After Francis”, the Health Committee said that it had

“been impressed by the approach of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust to the development of a staffing management tool. This appears to the Committee to be good practice, and the Committee recommends the adoption of this or similar systems across the NHS.”

Other Members have also mentioned that.

The Health Committee also said—we keep returning to staffing levels—that

“Ensuring adequate levels of both clinically- and non-clinically-qualified staff in all circumstances is therefore a fundamental requirement of high quality care, whatever the financial circumstances.”

As I have said, that is a key point. It is clear to me what should be done to ensure safe staffing levels—we have that excellent example—but it is also clear to me that the Government’s proposal for monthly publication of staffing levels is not adequate. Robert Francis is a convert to the position of the Safe Staffing Alliance and has said that minimum safe staffing levels should be drawn up by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and policed by the Care Quality Commission. He did not say that in his report, but he has subsequently said it to the CQC.

As we heard earlier in the debate, the Francis report was published as the Government’s NHS reforms took effect. It is clear that the structural changes involved in their unnecessary top-down reorganisation have caused upheaval and created new problems. Many Members have talked about restructuring decisions today. Those decisions are proving impossible to implement in many parts of the country, because there is no one really in charge. The chair of the British Medical Association, Dr Mark Porter, made that point earlier this year. Reorganisation costs are another problem, because they have taken money away from patient care. Change of that kind has not improved care in the NHS and has worked against the recommendations of the Francis report. As we heard earlier, the findings of surveys identify the problems that have been caused: seven out of 10 NHS staff members think that the Government’s reorganisation has had a negative impact on patient care, while only 3% think that it has improved patient care. That is a vote against what the Government have done.

Nothing makes the impact of the reforms clearer than the deteriorating performance of A and E departments and the crisis in recruitment to them. It is interesting to note the Public Accounts Committee report this week, which is in a very similar vein to that of the Health Committee. We know that more patients are waiting in A and E departments for longer than four hours: last year the figure was 1 million, whereas in 2009-10 it was only 345,000. The numbers speak for themselves. We know, too, that emergency admissions have increased by 51% in the past decade, with a 26% rise in admissions of over-85s in four years. That is serious: the biggest cause of pressure on local A and E services is the rising number of frail and older people with multiple long-term conditions.

Some Members have questioned the relevance of this to the Francis report, saying we should not be discussing all these issues, but I disagree. If we are concerned about safety and mortality rates, what happens on admission to A and E is a key factor. The consequences if things start going wrong was well understood by Salford Royal hospital: more people were dying unnecessarily at the weekends because of a lack of consultant cover, so the hospital changed that. Work on safety does not ignore what is going on in A and E or how much consultant cover there is; instead, it takes that into account and does something about it.

I am concerned that the number of frail older people attending A and E will continue to increase and that that situation will worsen as a result of continued cuts to social care budgets. We had a warning about that from Sandie Keene, director of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. She said

“it is absolutely clear that all the ingenuity and skill that we have brought to cushioning vulnerable people as far as possible from the effects of the economic circumstances cannot be stretched any further, and that some of the people we have responsibilities for may be affected by serious reductions in service—with more in the pipeline over the next two years.”

Unfortunately, excellent though our local hospital is, we are facing a situation where 1,000 people will lose their care packages this year, and I am very concerned about that.

[Jim Shannon]

The Francis report makes some recommendations on mental health, which is in the social care category. One of those suggestions was the training of family members to look after those with mental health conditions better at home, so as to improve their quality of life and help rehabilitate them. I do not see much of that in the report. Would the hon. Lady like there to be more emphasis on family members who are under pressure and are helping others with mental health conditions at home?

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed, and our most recent inquiries in the Health Committee are about mental health issues. There is a series of issues that need to be looked at. It is rare in a health debate for me not to mention carers. We need to be realistic about the fact that we are now putting a huge amount of pressure on those carers. Removing social care packages will affect our local hospital, but it will also affect those family members, because in the end who is the person who cares? It is the family member to whom the role falls.

To conclude the point about staffing issues in A and E, we found in our earlier inquiry that fewer than one in five emergency departments were able to provide consultant cover for 16 hours a day during the working week, and the figure is lower at weekends. The whole issue of mortality rates is very much linked to that, and we cannot ignore it. We must keep focusing on the problem with recruitment and the lack of consultant cover.

My right hon. Friend the shadow Health Secretary referred to the warnings by the president of the College of Emergency Medicine. During the time when the college was warning about these issues, Ministers were tied up in knots by the challenges of reorganisation. That is key. Ministers have insisted that they are acting now, but it is clear that those warnings from the CEM in 2010 did not get enough attention until recently. The staffing situation can hardly improve when so few higher trainee posts in emergency medicine are being filled. In the latest recruitment round, 156 out of 193 higher trainee emergency medicine posts went unfilled.

My final point is about the difficulties caused by the cost of the NHS reorganisation reforms. In the past few months the spotlight has fallen on unnecessary spending and waste. We all should be concerned about that. We know that emergency departments are spending £120 million a year on locums, and this could be getting worse. The Health Committee has also recently focused on redundancy costs, which have absorbed £1.4 billion of NHS funding since 2010, with £435 million attributed just to restructuring costs. The scandal of the scale of redundancy payments to NHS staff was made worse when we found out that such a revolving door was in operation. The Health Committee was told that of 19,100 people made redundant by the NHS, 3,200 were subsequently rehired by the NHS, including 2,500 rehired within a year and more than 400 rehired within 28 days. There were reports of payments of £605,000 made to an NHS executive whose husband also received a £345,000 pay-off, with both reported to have been subsequently rehired elsewhere in the NHS. That is a scandal. I know that the Minister said it would not happen again, but that is £1 million that could have been spent on patient care.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Barbara Keeley]

I would prefer not to. That money could and should have been spent on improving staffing, particularly nursing staffing. Those patients and family members who have been let down by NHS failures, of which we have heard innumerable examples, deserve to know that everything possible is being done to avoid such failures in future.

Of all the things I have talked about, safe staffing is crucial, as is transparency and staffing ratios. We increasingly have to take on board the fact that there is a funding gap in both the NHS and social care. Indeed, the chair of the British Medical Association said in his new year statement that the funding gap in the NHS is so bad that if the NHS was a country, it would not have even have a credit rating. That is what we are facing.

[Alun Cairns]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Barbara Keeley]

No, I do not have time.

Given that situation, we have to learn that precious NHS resources cannot be wasted on reorganisation and redundancies any more, particularly where staff are being rehired. The NHS will reach its 70th birthday in 2018, so let us hope that all the measures we are talking about today, and the implementation of whole-person care under a Labour Government, will help it be in better shape.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I reread the executive summary of the Francis report yesterday when I was on a train journey, and I decided that in today’s debate I would like to look at one of the most crucial aspects of his findings in respect of what happened at Mid Staffs.

On page 62, at paragraph 1.102, the summary states:

“The senior officials in the DH have accepted it has responsibility for the stewardship of the NHS and in that sense that it bears some responsibility for the failure of the healthcare system to detect and prevent the deficiencies at Mid Staffordshire sooner than it did. There is no doubt about the authenticity of their expressions of shock at the appalling story that has emerged from Mid Staffordshire. However, it is not possible to avoid the impression that it lacks a sufficient unifying theme and direction, with regard to patient safety, to move forward from this point in spite of the recent reforms put in place by the current Government.”

It goes on to say:

“Where there are perceived deficiencies, it is tempting to change the system rather than to analyse what needs to change, whether it be leadership, personnel, a definition of standards or, most importantly, culture. System or structural change is not only destabilising but it can be counterproductive in giving the appearance of addressing concerns rapidly while in fact doing nothing about the really difficult issues which will require long-term consistent management. While the DH asserted the importance of quality of care and patient safety in its documentation and its policies, it failed to recognise that the structural reorganisations imposed upon trusts, PCTs and SHAs implementing such policy have on occasion made such a focus very difficult in practice.”

It is my contention that we could probably say that of every reorganisation of the NHS, certainly in my three decades in politics.

The summary goes on to discuss the lessons learned and related key recommendations:

“The negative aspects of culture in the system were identified as including: a lack of openness to criticism; a lack of consideration for patients; defensiveness; looking inwards not outwards; secrecy; misplaced assumptions about the judgements and actions of others; an acceptance of poor standards; a failure to put the patient first in everything that is done.”

It goes on:

“It cannot be suggested that all these characteristics are present everywhere in the system all of the time, far from it, but their existence anywhere means that there is an insufficiently shared positive culture.”

Again, it is my contention that that sums up not just the past 30 years but perhaps the past 60 years of our national health service.

The summary goes on to say that achieving change

“does not require radical reorganisation but re-emphasis of what is truly important”.

All parties in the House should recognise that it is not the reorganisation but the re-emphasis of what is important that is significant. Paragraph 1.119 lists how that can be achieved:

“Emphasis on and commitment to common values throughout the system by all within it; readily accessible fundamental standards and means of compliance; no tolerance of non compliance and the rigorous policing of fundamental standards; openness, transparency and candour in all the system’s business; strong leadership in nursing and other professional values; strong support for leadership roles; a level playing field for accountability; information accessible and useable by all allowing effective comparison of performance by individuals, services and organisation.”

I was not surprised by any of that.

The right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) was a member of the Select Committee on Health in the previous Parliament between 2005 and 2010, and I had the privilege of chairing that Committee. In 2009 the Committee looked at patient safety in the NHS. We visited one of only four hospitals that were part of a patient safety project on how to look after patients inside hospitals, never mind outside. We looked at some of the major issues at the time, such as how different parts of the NHS interacted and their failure to communicate with one another properly. Much of the time they were working with different regulations, and occasionally the inspectorate was not sure what it was responsible for inspecting. This whole restructuring has been going on for a very long time, and it has been more confusing to people working inside.

I am pleased with how the Government have reacted to some of the Francis report’s main recommendations, but I take issue with them on one point. If we are to change the culture inside the NHS, we really need to look at the duty of candour. The Government have accepted the report’s recommendation on a duty of candour for organisations, but they have rejected the recommendation to extend that duty to individuals. I think that is fundamentally wrong.

I spent nine years as a lay member of the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, and for the first few years I would sit on fitness-to-practise committees. I think that the only way we shall get change is if individuals have responsibility for the duty of candour, not just organisations. I believe that the Government have got that fundamentally wrong. If they really want to tackle the issues that led to the awful situation at Mid Staffs, they need that duty of candour to extend to individuals.

On the Government’s decision on the duty of candour, the Patients Association has stated:

“We question that if individuals are not already motivated by their own professional code, how will a duty on their employer encourage them to come forward?”

That is absolutely right. It continued:

“Without this fundamental change within the NHS, the Duty will just be providing lip service to the issue of patient safety and patients will struggle to see any real improvements.”

That is a big assumption, but on balance I agree. It is something that the Government, no matter who is in Richmond House, need to tackle throughout the NHS.

I have in my hand a copy of the Health Committee’s report on patient safety, which was published in July 2009. We looked at patient safety across the health care system and compared it with what was happening abroad. We visited New Zealand, which has a comparable health system—I accept that the country has only 4 million occupants, compared with our 60-odd million. We looked at why the culture here is the way it is, why people are not open and why they do not learn from mistakes that other health professionals have made. Often those mistakes are not reported because people fear they will get into trouble. We took evidence from the British Airline Pilots Association and learned that any mistake a pilot makes in an aeroplane is whizzed around the world so that other pilots understand it and learn the lessons immediately. That is not the case in our health service.

I want to mention two of the Committee’s findings from New Zealand. The first relates to investigating complaints. I do not think that leaving the duty of candour to organisations, as the Government suggest, will work well. New Zealand has a statutory body—I have mentioned it before in the House—called the Health and Disability Commissioner, which resolves complaints. People can go to the commissioner to request investigations, and they can do so anonymously if they do not want their colleagues to know about it. It is completely independent of the health care system. It works, and it has been working for many decades.

Another area we looked at in New Zealand—again, I accept that it is a very small country—was compensation and redress. I know from my experience of 30 years in Parliament that when people complain about something that happened to them in their local hospital that they are unhappy about, they are treated as if they are going to get into litigation and that it will cost a lot of money; immediately the barriers come up. That culture is not good for our health service, it is costing massive amounts of money for us as taxpayers, and it is certainly not good for the individual concerned. I do not know how many times I have been told that all the patient wanted was an admission that the hospital got it wrong and an apology; they did not necessarily want money. New Zealand has a redress system that some might call a no-fault liability system. Here, it would mean getting rid of lots of lawyers who make massive amounts of money and careers from public money for NHS litigation. Just those two areas hold back changing what is wrong in our system.

[Barbara Keeley]

I wonder whether my right hon. Friend has had similar cases to a difficult one that I had for months involving someone whose wife died in terrible circumstances at home. He was badly let down by the care she received and he wanted redress. He found that people were happy to have meetings with him and to talk to him, and were sympathetic and supportive, but whenever something was put in writing, it was absolutely dreadful. He was very offended and horrified by everything that was in writing, and that is the chilling effect of lawyers because they checked everything. It ruins the support that can be given after a difficult bereavement and when someone has a real case. Things can be said, but they cannot be written down.

[Kevin Barron]

I agree entirely. The system is defensive and people do not get a satisfactory response, but the lessons are not learned. Issues are not reported for fear of the consequences. The Minister is a doctor. He will know that if as a junior doctor he had seen a senior doctor doing something wrong and had gone public about it, it might have affected his career. Some young doctors’ careers have been affected. That is not good for the system, and it is certainly not good for patients.

I am a wholehearted supporter of the national health service and the way it is funded. There is none better in the world, and we can use it without question. It may be different in different parts of the country, but access to health care in this country is second to none in the world for the whole population as opposed to just those with money. Could it better? Yes, and what the Francis report said was a lesson for all of us, and for the national health service. We should change the culture, but we will not do that with reorganisation or by blaming one another in the Chamber for what is right or wrong. That just feeds the politics of the national health service. We must change the culture by putting the patient first, and after 60-odd years it is about time we did.