'Hands Off Our NHS': the attitude that led to the horrors of Mid Staffs
The reason the NHS lets patients down, says David Prior, chairman of the Care Quality Commission, is that “it became too powerful to criticise. When things were going wrong, people didn’t say anything. If you criticised the NHS – the attitude was ‘how dare you?’”...

...The people who make the noise are doctrinal. They are attached to the NHS, not because it works, but because it is the only part of the British state which operates on socialist principles: production according to ability, distribution according to need, ownership of all assets by the government. (I am often struck, as an MEP, by the fact that no mainstream Continental social democrats want to replace their pluralist systems with a British-style state monopoly. Only Marxist parties make that argument. But that’s for another blog.)...

...At the very moment that Andy Burnham, Labour’s last health secretary, was calling me “unpatriotic” for drawing attention to Britain’s poor performance in international league tables, he was presiding over the abominations at Mid Staffs and elsewhere. Those two facts are connected. When the NHS is treated, not as one among several competing models of healthcare provision, but as a test of patriotism, it is bound to become flabby and self-serving. That’s the real legacy of the HandsOffOurNHS crowd.

National Health SHAMBLES: Three damning reports describe mothers abandoned during labour, serious hospital blunders every day and how patients have lost faith in their GPs
Three damning reports last night laid bare the crisis in NHS hospitals, maternity units and GP surgeries.

One investigation revealed that a quarter of new mothers were abandoned by their midwives during labour, with some left to give birth on the floor or in corridors.

The second found that mistakes deemed so serious they should never happen are being made in hospitals five times a week.

And the third survey said thousands of patients have all but given up trying to secure appointments with their family doctor.

The reports come only a day after the NHS watchdog detailed a catalogue of failings at GP surgeries, including consulting rooms infested with maggots and patients being given dangerous, out-of-date drugs.

Public confidence in the Health Service is already at a record low following a run of inquiries exposing a culture of appalling patient care and bureaucratic cover-ups....

...‘Politicians have been scared to raise issues and nobody dared criticise the NHS. But the public are well ahead of politicians and they’ve suspected problems for some time. I’ve had elderly constituents scared to go into their local hospitals because of their experiences or those of their spouses....