Sick of NHS excuses

They are depressingly typical reasons for failure within one of the many and varied arms of the National Health Service.

At the heart of this scandal at Walsall Manor Hospital are dozens of devastated families.

To the medical professionals and the bureaucrats, these are 'foetal remains'.

To many of the would-have-been parents they were their hopes and their dreams for decades of joy and love, lost through tragedy.

Some may have already had names chosen for them. Some may have even had nurseries painted or furnished in readiness for the day proud mothers and fathers would have brought them home, a day that never came.

But lost in the system, their remains were handled simply by historical custom and practice.

Clinicians had a history of not filling out documents, leaving responsibility to a single pathologist over 12 years.

There had been no mortuary manager for years, with no formal training given to staff who took on the duties.

A full training plan is being put in place to ensure lessons are learned.

That it should even be necessary to train people to dispose properly of mortal remains is depressing at the very least.

How many more cases will it take to prove not only to the Government but also to the medical profession that the NHS has to change?

Stafford Hospital was a scandal that involved the loss of life due to poor care and an obsession with targets.

The desperately sad story at Walsall is one of paperwork and procedure having been substituted for what many would consider to be basic decency.

It is not unreasonable to say that the NHS is a vastly different organisation to the one set up in the 1940s. It has grown and splintered into numerous bodies.

As we reported at the weekend, it has got to the stage where hospitals are being forced to pay hugely costly agency fees for nurses or seek permanent staff from overseas because too few are being trained and recruited here.

To step back and view it as one organisation, as most people would, the situation appears absurd. But this is just in a day's work for the dedicated medical staff of the NHS, trying their best in an increasingly impossible situation.

Police have better things to do

To many people, the idea of police marching teenagers home if they are on the streets after 9pm sounds an awful lot like a curfew.

But this is not some Orwellian vision come to the streets of Tipton.

Residents have had enough of thugs throwing bricks, smashing windows and knocking their doors before running away.

How depressing that it must come to this.

Under 16s should not be out on the streets causing trouble between 9pm and 6am. That is when they should be at home, preferably getting a good night's sleep ready for school the next morning.

Their parents should know this. And in the age of mobile phones, it is easier than ever to send them a message and call them home.

It should not have to fall to the police, facing deep and swingeing cuts to their funding, to have to bring home errant teenagers. There are plenty of crimes they would rather be dealing with.

Of course, officers are responding to a problem reported by residents and are simply trying to help.

But how much simpler would it be if parents did not leave it to the authorities to solve the problems their children are causing?

We hope that repeat offenders are punished, rather than just sent home to do it all over again another day.