Health secretary's renewed attack on NHS warns that the 'weeds of failure grow more quickly in a garden of mediocrity'
Jeremy Hunt has renewed his criticism of NHS care and culture by warning that the service's tolerance of "mediocrity" could result in another Mid Staffs scandal.
The health secretary attacked what he said was hospitals' reluctance to drive up the standard of care they provide and refusal to seek patients' views on how they have been treated.
Risking alienating NHS staff with another strongly worded denunciation of the service, he said that too many hospitals represented "a garden of mediocrity", the "weeds" from which risked patients being neglected and put at risk, as at Stafford hospital. The service should be seeking "universal excellence" to match the universal access it provides, he argued.
"The NHS was set up 65 years ago not just to deliver universal equity, but universal excellence. It has been much better at delivering the former than the latter – but if it is to live up to its founding ideas it needs to deliver both," Hunt told a gathering of NHS leaders.
"So my question today is this: we celebrate excellence. We criticise failure. But do we do enough to challenge mediocrity? Because left unchallenged, it becomes entrenched, part of the culture," he added.
"And that is precisely the moment of greatest danger if we are to prevent the next Mid Staffs. The weeds of failure grow more quickly in a garden of mediocrity."
He lauded the NHS for making the UK the best place in the world to be ill for the poor and socially disadvantaged and for having "enriched" last year's Olympic Games through Danny Boyle's celebration of the service in the event's opening ceremony – a feature which Hunt reputedly tried to have removed or watered down when told about it in advance, when he was still the culture secretary.
But without every part of the NHS pursuing excellence, Mid Staffs public inquiry chairman Robert Francis QC's call for a radical overhaul in how it works and its attitude to patients would not be fulfilled, he said.
"Unless we create a climate of excellence in the parts of the NHS that are neither good nor bad, we will fail to address the cultural challenge that Robert Francis describes," said Hunt. Striving for routine excellence must be a key part of how the NHS responds to Francis's landmark report last month into how between 400 and 1,200 patients died at Stafford hospital because of poor care between 2005 and 2009.
via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/08/jeremy-hunt-nhs-mediocrity-mid-staffs
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