Who needs facts when you can just make stuff up. Vote Tory and your relatives will die in hospital.
Two things you can be sure of in life…death and taxes…and that the BBC will lie through its teeth to put Labour back in power.
OK…Three things that you can be sure of in life….
When reports about events at Stafford Hospital finally came out the BBC ducked and dived to avoid mentioning Labour’s role in the chaos in the NHS that resulted in hundreds of deaths…the BBC preferring to place the blame solely onto hospital management.
Now in the run up to an election the BBC has changed its mind about pointing the finger of blame, in fact it has gone one better, instead of just blaming the encumbent government for any deaths in the NHS they have predicted, well, speculated, that Tory reforms of the NHS will result in another ‘Stafford’ with patients dropping like flies.
The BBC’s Nick Triggle asks disengenuously…
Now that’s a curious opening to a report on another deadly scandal that happened under Labour’s watch. Surely the BBC’s report’s thrust should be on the actual scandal and not on sensationalist, and highly political, speculation.
What does Triggle base his speculation on? Curiously it’s on yet another report of a scandal, under Labour….and yet once again you’d be hard pushed to know that as ‘Labour’ isn’t mentioned.
You might in fact be misled into thinking this was a scandal that occured under this government on reading Triggle’s opening lines…
Lethal. Shocking. Unacceptable. Dysfunctional. Failures at every level. So said the report into maternity care at Cumbria’s Furness General Hospital.
But as was pointed out repeatedly as the inquiry published its findings on Tuesday, the parallels with Stafford Hospital are chillingly similar. In fact, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt went as far as calling it a “second” Stafford Hospital – albeit it on a smaller scale.
Certainly it took until 2011 for the scandal to ‘break’ but it had been going on since 2004…hardly down to the Coalition you might judge….and one reason it didn’t ‘break’ was because Labour signed off on Trust status for the hospital and was told that legally the Department of Health couldn’t then intervene (page 10)…..
As the application had been deferred in 2009, rather than rejected, the Trust did not go through the quality assessment newly introduced by the DH in the aftermath of the Mid Staffordshire affair, and the DH received legal advice that it should not intervene, as the application had already received the Secretary of State’s approval in 2009.
Triggle goes on to suggest what happened could still be going on now…
In both cases it led to unnecessary suffering – and it was left to patients to expose the truth. So can we be sure this is not happening elsewhere?
Dr Bill Kirkup, the chair of the Morecambe Bay Inquiry, named after the trust which ran the hospital, admitted as such. He said “there could be elements” of what he found happening elsewhere when pressed by journalists.
But then again ‘There might not be.’ Pure speculation.
Triggle suggests a cause for the scandal…changes in the NHS…
Why? The report lists in detail a series of missed opportunities by the North West Health Authority, Care Quality Commission and Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to tackle the problems at an earlier stage.
This spanned a period when the structure of regulation and monitoring was changing. Some of this was part of the constant state of revolution the NHS finds itself in, but other changes were being made in light of the Stafford Hospital scandal.
Triggle’s final paragraph slips the knife in to the hilt and makes the claim that Coalition (ie Tory) reforms to the NHS will result in similar scandals and deaths…
The NHS has just under gone one of its biggest ever reorganisations with the dismantling of regional health authorities and primary care trusts.
It begs the question: in a couple of years could we be in the same position we are now?
Must be an election coming.
Yet another reason why Mr Burnham should be on trial for neglect of duty whilst in office. Every time he speaks I note the stench of hypocrisy and slime dripping onto the floor.
If any other business had overseen such behaviour, including the pathetic attempts to cover up the facts, there would be some very serious cases of corporate manslaughter to be faced.
Why are the NHS allowed to get away with this, and why – as would be the case in any private company – are the management right up to the “MD” (in this case Burnham) not facing lengthy jail sentences?
Anyone hiding or obfuscating the facts (BBC included) should be held responsible for aiding and abetting; how many people suffered or died as a result of these facts NOT being made public? Would you go to a medical facility if you were aware that your chances of leaving alive were vastly reduced due to staff incompetence?
Funny, I can’t remember a word of criticism from the BBC when Labour were in power. It was relentless good news: reduced waiting times, more operations being carried out, new hospitals being built. New GP contract? – bring it on, brothers!
Now all the shit that happened on Labour’s watch is out in the open the BBC sleight-of-hand deftly hints at it all being the coalition’s fault and never once have they held Burnham to account (gobsmacking when you think of the opportunities he’s given them) but in fact the opposite, giving him a regular platform to spout his hypocritical propaganda.
And every day now we have some negative report on the BBC news about the NHS. What was the purpose again of that meeting that Miliband had with the BBC a few weeks ago?