Preventing needless deaths and injuries to patients must be a key pillar of NHS England’s new ten-year health plan, a campaign group has said.
“The backbone of the plan must be cutting the number of safety incidents which lead to unnecessary harm and deaths,” said Guy Forster, joint vice president of not-for-profit group APIL (the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers) which has campaigned for the rights of victims of negligence for more than 30 years.
“Wholesale application of the NHS legal requirement of a ‘duty of candour’ would be a solid, positive step towards tackling the patient safety crisis. It requires healthcare leaders to be open and honest with patients and their families when things go wrong,” said Guy.
“Compliance with the duty has been sporadic, despite various programmes to get it into play. Without candour, vital lessons are not learned when failures in care happen and the same patterns of harm are repeated again and again.
“We’ve seen cases where hospital trusts have recorded that a ‘duty of candour discussion’ has taken place but even the patients still don’t know what happened to them,” he said.
APIL has also told the Department of Health and Social Care, which is carrying out a consultation on the ten-year health plan, that individual NHS bosses must be subject to national regulations and held accountable for patient safety breaches.
“When managers fail persistently, they should be replaced. For the good of the patients the NHS’s leaders and managers ought to abide by agreed professional standards, and have their conduct and responsibilities properly governed,” he said.
APIL analysis of NHS England data shows a 30 per cent rise in the number of patients dying or severely harmed due to sub-standard NHS treatment in the past 10 years. In 2022/23 alone this equated to 39 patients dying or suffering serious, permanent harm every day.
APIL is calling for a co-ordinated strategy to improve patient safety in the NHS.
“Currently there is a fragmented approach to patient safety and it is clearly not working,” said Guy. “There are many frameworks, schemes, and reporting mechanisms, but the system lacks cohesion. For positive change to take place there needs to be strong and comprehensible leadership, with an all-encompassing link between patients, regulators, healthcare providers, and policymakers.”