NHS chief refuses to quit despite failures

London Evening Standard/London

NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson yesterday admitted personal failings over Britain’s biggest hospital scandal but refused to resign over it.

In heated exchanges with MPs, he was accused of being a “process man, a procedure man” who had been unaware that up to 1,200 patients were dying unnecessarily.

Sir David, who briefly headed the strategic health authority which oversaw the shamed Mid-Staffordshire Trust, also caused astonishment when he said he had not been aware of mortality rates at Stafford Hospital.

He denied that a “blind eye” had been turned.

But he admitted patients had not been put at “the centre of the way the system operated” as managers chased government targets.

He told the Commons health committee: “For a whole variety of reasons, not because people were bad but because there were a whole set of changes going on and a whole set of things we were being held accountable for from the centre, which created an environment where the leadership of the NHS lost its focus — and I will put my hands up to that — I was part of that. In a sense my learning through all of that is never to let it happen again.”

MPs and patients’ families are calling for Sir David’s resignation following the publication of the Francis Report into serious failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.

Up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly at Stafford Hospital after they were “routinely neglected” between 2005 and 2008.

Sir David was chief executive of three strategic health authorities, including Shropshire and Staffordshire from August 2005 to June 2006, during a merger.

Labour MP Valerie Vaz tore into him for not doing more as patients were dying in shocking conditions. “You are a process man, a procedure man,” she said. She also expressed surprise that he did not have access to information about patient death rates.

Vaz added: “You seem to not be able to remember lots of things that go on.” But Sir David firmly rejected the suggestion of a “trick” not to recollect events and stressed that standardised mortality rates were not widely available in the NHS at that time.

Tory MP David Tredinnick rounded on Sir David for not asking for this data. The NHS chief said: “At that moment in time, surprising as it may seem in retrospect, it was not part of the regular way in which NHS organisations were monitored.”

He added that he did visit the hospital during the time when problems were emerging but was not alerted to the neglect and poor care. Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George stressed that Sir David had been presiding over a system where clinical priorities were being distorted by targets.