Just last month, the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) published 6 monthly safety incident reporting figures for NHS Trusts for April to September 2008. You can find the report for your trust here.

In these reports, the ‘flagship’ Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, which everybody in the NHS clinical governance system has been trying so hard to distance themselves from today (details here), came out as a fairly normal, average reporting institution. The implication is that the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, this apparently appallingly managed, target-driven travesty of healthcare, had an approach to patient safety that was about average. So were they lying in their incident reporting? The answer is probably no more than any other Trust, given that the Healthcare Commission rated the trust service quality as “fair” in 2007 and “good” in 2008. Similarly, when poor care was being delivered through the Trust, Monitor’s annual checks found “no regulatory concerns” (see Guardian report here), and gave the hospital four out of five for performance. Trusts are all target-driven and all significantly under-reporting in terms of safety.

There are a great many Trusts that are performing a lot worse in these reports. Some of them are also due to be made Foundation Trusts in the very near future. In the case of our local hospital in the south west for example, which is one of the most poorly performing ones in the NPSA reports (and where our baby died recently due to ‘sub-optimal care’), Foundation Trust status is due to be granted on 1st April. April Fools Day. One of the criteria for becoming a Foundation Trust is supposed to be demonstrating that the quality of care is a top priority. I hardly need tell you what I think about this. Maybe, if we were all to become ‘members’ of Foundation Trusts then we could do something, but the signs from the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust suggest that we probably couldn’t.

The events at Mid Staffordshire may well reflect much deeper, more endemic problems in healthcare and leave confidence in NHS patient safety, and particularly the regulation of it, in absolute tatters.

Related posts:

• Professionals’ views about safety in maternity services.
• ‘Extraordinary’ failure of NHS staff to report preventable deaths.
• Hospitals face NHS health checks.
• Another indication of poor NHS lesson learning.
• How more might be learned about Stillbirth and Neonatal Death.