Managers who silence whistleblowers will ‘never work in the NHS again’, Streeting promises | 2024 general election

NHS managers who silence whistleblowers and scapegoats will be banned from working in the service, the shadow health secretary has said, as part of a determined Labor Party campaign to stamp out a culture of concealment.

In an interview with the Guardian, Wes Streeting pledged to push through formal regulation of NHS managers and warned the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that its inspectors must improve significantly at detecting health safety risks. patients in order to regain the trust of front-line staff.

“I think the only way to truly protect whistleblowers and create a culture of honesty and openness is to have strong enforcement measures in place,” he said.

“I am extremely serious when I say that NHS managers who silence whistleblowers will be removed and will never work in the NHS again. This is the number one priority of the system. And I want people to have the confidence to speak up and come forward.

With just days to go before potentially replacing Victoria Atkins as health secretary, Streeting said one of her biggest fears was uncovering more patient safety scandals, particularly in healthcare maternity. Investigations over the past decade into birth care scandals at Morecambe Bay, East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trusts have painted a grim picture of babies and mothers being injured, brain damaged or dying after receiving inadequate care.

Other studies are examining the appalling risks to mothers and babies in more hospitals where there have been preventable deaths and injuries, including in Nottingham.

Streeting said: “I am extremely concerned about maternity services. And what scares me is the issues that we have seen raised in relation to Nottingham and Kent. I think they are a risk factor across the NHS, and they are one of the main reasons why we are losing midwives faster than we can recruit them in some cases.”

Three reviews into serious patient safety failings have recommended regulation of senior NHS managers, allowing them to be disbarred if they silence whistleblowers. Streeting accused Tory health secretaries of repeatedly failing to implement the change.

This week, Ian Trenholm, the boss of CQC, unexpectedly resigned. In a subsequent internal memo leaked to the Health Service Journal, Kate Terroni, who was appointed interim chief executive of CQC, admitted the company was failing to keep patients safe and losing the trust of the NHS and ministers . The memo reportedly said: “Our way of working is not working and we are failing to consistently ensure the safety of people who use the services. »

Streeting said the instinct to protect the NHS’s reputation “at all costs” had to change.

He said: “Some doctors are afraid to speak out because they think, ‘If I speak out, will I be deported?’ There are actually a lot of frontline staff who are really trying to speak out or raise the alarm about patient safety and system pressures and who feel silenced, scapegoated, in some cases intimidated and that has to stop.”

Senior NHS executives and whistleblowers have long said the regulator is failing to do its job and failing to uncover cover-ups. On Thursday, NHS Providers chief executive Sir Julian Hartley said the CQC report “confirms what trust leaders have known for a long time: the regulator is in urgent need of reform”.

Streeting said he recognized the CQC was losing the trust of affected NHS staff and said he was calling for a tougher inspection regime.

“When I was education minister, I can’t remember a single time when I went to a school and the teacher said ‘what we really want is longer Ofsted inspections, more Ofsted, please,” he said. “And yet, as Minister of Health, I have been very struck by front-line staff, often nurses, who say that in fact we don’t feel like we’re being listened to. And we don’t feel like they’re asking the right questions and that if they are, we can tell them where the patient safety challenges are.

“So I think the CQC needs to make sure that inspectors are asking the right questions of the right people and looking under the bonnet, particularly in relation to patient safety, as staff have more confidence in it.”

Streeting said the experience of Guardian editor Merope Mills had been a “wake-up call” as she described watching her 13-year-old daughter Martha die a preventable death from sepsis in hospital because senior doctors refused to listen when she raised the alarm. He said the health service should “go further” than the Martha rule, which gives patients the right to demand a second opinion on their condition.

The British Medical Association, the main doctors’ union, welcomed Labour’s plan to regulate managers. Professor Philip Banfield, chairman of its council, said: “Those who lead NHS organisations must, like doctors, be held accountable for their actions and the decisions they make, rather than being quietly moved to another senior role in what amounts to a shameful revolving door of incompetence.”

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“As long as this culture of protectionism, rather than accountability, prevails, doctors will continue to face appalling persecution and I fear that the Pandora’s box about to be wide open will be much larger than the Post office scandal. »

A growing number of doctors are coming to the BMA “desperate to expose the cover-ups, but also desperately afraid for themselves and their colleagues if they do”, he said.

Patient safety campaigner James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died in the Morecambe Bay maternity hospital scandal, said subsequent events showed the government’s decision in 2014 not to regulate NHS managers, against the advice of the official Mid Staffordshire healthcare scandal inquiry, was a mistake.

“We have too often seen a culture within the NHS in which reputation has been placed above the interests of patient safety,” he said.

Streeting said he was also committed to tackling diversity in the NHS and the bullying that black staff often face within the health service. “I look at the fact that black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth and black men are twice as likely to die of prostate cancer as white men. And I think those issues are interlinked,” he said.

He added: “Black NHS staff face a particular challenge when it comes to bullying and I have heard it time and time again. This directly concerns patient safety. It also indicates whether or not we will achieve our ambitions to reduce health inequalities in our society.

If Labour wins the election, Streeting will inherit a ministry that will face some of the toughest challenges in government: strikes, an NHS budget deficit estimated at £38bn by the end of the parliament, and nearly 10 million people on waiting lists. Strikes will be at the heart of her short-term concerns.

“I cannot bear the thought of patients suffering further misery because of further strikes or of the NHS investing large amounts of money after paying the cost of the strikes rather than resolving them,” he said.

Streeting said the party’s ambitions began with a commitment to 40,000 extra appointments a week, and he repeatedly referred to the last Labour government’s success in ending expectations.

“The one advantage I would have, which none of my opponents have, is that I have every Labour health secretary, from Andy Burnham to Alan Milburn, in my corner, on the end of the phone,” he said. “These are people who have a proven track record of running the NHS and delivering the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.