Insult to public

PERHAPS the most shameful aspect of the Mid-Staffordshire Hospital scandal – in which poor care led to the deaths of hundreds of patients – is that the hospital was a foundation trust, a status that is supposed to signify excellence. Indeed, according to the subsequent inquiry, one of the reasons for the trust’s failings was its concentration on winning this coveted status at the expense of giving attention to its patients.

There are, therefore, huge questions to be answered by Monitor, the NHS regulator supposedly charged with judging whether trusts are good enough to be awarded foundation status. In fact, the verdict of Robert Francis, the QC who chaired the inquiry, was that Monitor essentially “ignored issues of patient safety and poor care” and that its responsibility for authorising foundation status should be removed.

It might, therefore, be argued that this beleaguered regulator needs all the advice it can get. But in spending a third of its £19.5m budget on obtaining advice from four different firms of consultants, Monitor is surely adding fresh public insult to its already disgraceful history as a key player in what must be Britain’s biggest public-sector scandal.

It has been pointed out that the likely effect of the implementation of the Francis inquiry’s recommendations is that Monitor would be left without a role and effectively closed down. These latest revelations suggest that the sooner this happens, the better.