NHS still unsafe, warns Stafford Hospital inquiry chief
The NHS is so unsafe that if it were an airline aeroplanes would 'fall out of the sky all the time', the man who led the Stafford Hospital inquiry has warned.
Robert Francis QC said the public had been given a misleading impression about the quality of care being provided in many of the country's hospitals and urged for radical changes.
He also accused health bosses of being so 'complacent' that they believed it was reasonable for some patients to be badly failed as long as the majority were not harmed.
"If we ran our airline industry on the same basis, planes would be falling out of the sky all the time," the barrister said.
"We've just got to change the attitude that because it's provided by the state it's all right for a number of people to be treated badly; well it's not. Airlines would go out of business very quickly if they worked that way."
And he said the public was still not given a true picture of standards of healthcare across the health service.
"Because we've not had access to genuine information about how well things are done, the public have had a perception that things are rather better than they probably are," he said.
Mr Francis led two inquiries into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust which exposed a culture of appalling care and abuse.
He is now president of the Patients' Association charity and spoke out about health bosses blaming patients for overcrowding.
"I do find it of concern that the public seem to get criticised for crowding A&E out," he said.
"Why is it they go there? It's because they have no alternative that they have trust and confidence in. The answer is not to get the people to fit in with the service – you need the service to fit in with the people."
His intervention comes 15 months on from when he revealed a raft of 290 reforms the NHS needed to make following the Stafford Hospital scandal which saw hundreds of patients suffer and even die.
Since his landmark report, 14 NHS hospital trusts were investigated over high death rates, with 11 placed in 'special measures' in a bid to improve major failings.
Last week, in a speech to safety experts, Mr Hunt said that it was 'utterly, utterly shocking' that every week, surgeons operate on the wrong part of a patient's body, with 12,500 deaths a year because of blunders by NHS staff.
