A Health Committee report has stated that the NHS has failed to collect evidence about whether patients are any safer after a decade of initiatives to stop harm.
Significant failings in current patient safety policy and the persistent failure to eliminate the “blame culture” must also be urgently addressed. While the committee acknowledged that important steps towards tackling safety have been taken, such as the creation of the National Patient Safety Agency, it added that, all too often, NHS boards pay more attention to governance, finances and targets rather than considering patient safety. It claimed that regulation of safety issues has become “burdensome and costly, involving too many organisations, whose roles are ill-defined” and pointed out that the Annual Health Check failed to detect notorious cases of bad care, such as that highlighted at the Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust. It stressed that primary care Trusts must ensure the quality and safety of the services they pay for, but claimed that this rarely happens. The Committee was also highly critical of the Department of Health for failing to establish a timetable for introducing the NHS Redress Scheme and pointed out that patients continue to face lengthy and distressing litigation to obtain justice. Other issues raised included delays in introducing technologies proven to improve patient safety and serious deficiencies in the medical training curriculum. The report recommended that: • Boards and senior management should make patient safety the top priority. • Commissioning, performance management and regulation arrangements must be clarified and rationalised to become more effective. • Patient harm rates must be measured by regular reviews of samples of patients’ case notes. • Harmed patients and their families should always receive full and frank information
