Secrecy surrounding Midland hospital failures
Mar 30 2009 by Alison Dayani, Birmingham Post
would be able and sufficiently informed to pick it up and have a level of courage to do something about it.
“But we are well informed and I have never felt like anything is being hidden. We were amazed when we were told the meals would not be made on site, but we don’t have any power to change this plan as governors.
Birmingham City Councillor Sue Anderson noticed a difference and as a governor for Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust, Coun Anderson told city’s health scrutiny members that “As soon as a trust becomes a Foundation trust the shutters do come down.”
Monitor, which now regulates the new breed of Foundation trusts instead of the Department of Health, seems reticent to be drawn into plans to change the system and is standing firm.
“There is no legal requirement for Foundation trusts to hold public board meetings,” said a Monitor spokesman.” It is at the discretion of trust boards to decide whether to allow public access to its meetings.
“Monitor published a Code of Governance which encourages openness from the board ‘unless this conflicts with a need to protect the wider interests of the public or the NHS foundation trust such as commercial-in-confidence matters’.”
But small changes are afoot and in the wake of the Stafford Hospital report, Monitor is calling on more assurances from watchdog bodies to look into patient concerns at Foundation trusts.
Monitor is also working with the Department of Health to make every trust publish annual reports on quality and medical performance in order to show “greater openness and accountability”.
For grieving relatives Julie Bailey and Lisa Everton-Richards it does not go far enough.
Mrs Everton-Richards’ 35-year-old IT consultant husband Paul was one of two cancer patients who died after being wrongly overdosed by a toxic side-effect drug at Heartlands Hospital, run by Heart of England Foundation Trust in July 2007.
“There are a lot of things that can get brushed under the carpet at Foundation hospitals, things that would have come out in public meetings and reports in the old system,” said the widow, from Sutton Coldfield.
“The family of the other overdosed patient didn’t even know for months that there were two victims until inquest hearings began. It’s a disgrace that things are not more open. How many other deaths do we not know about?
“Foundation status has given hospital chiefs a loophole to keep damaging problems secret from the public who fund them.”
Ms Bailey, who battled to highlight problems at Stafford Hospital after her 86-year-old mother Isabella Bailey died in November, 2007, said Foundation status became a barrier to the shameful failures not being unearthed sooner.
“If it wasn’t for Foundation status, these problems could have been dealt with sooner and saved lives,” said Ms Bailey, from Stafford.
“It created a climate of secrecy. People like me could not scrutinise what was going on and that needs to happen for a good reason. This is our NHS, these hospitals have to be as open as they were before Foundation status was created or more deaths like at Stafford will take place.”
