Deaths expose hospital failings

It passed its inspections and it met the Government's quality of care benchmarks. Yet, just like the Staffordshire hospitals, this data masked failings over out-of-hours care.

No one will ever know whether night nurse practitioner Anne Grigg-Booth deliberately killed any of the patients who died while under her care – she died before she could stand trial.

It appears her life changed irrevocably after she was the first voluntary nurse on the scene of the Omagh bomb atrocity in 1998. Her family were on holiday in the area – and the scenes she witnessed clearly tormented her as she began drinking more heavily.

Yet this is no consolation to the families of loved ones whose deaths became the subject of a murder inquiry – and those who Mrs Grigg-Booth was accused of poisoning.

It also does not excuse the inherent weaknesses in the night-time supervision of the hospital which allowed senior night nurses, like Mrs Grigg-Booth, to prescribe intravenous opiates to seriously ill patients.

This was in direct contravention of hospital policy. Yet they did so for many years – and senior managers did nothing about it because they turned a blind eye, or were simply unaware that procedures were being ignored.

As yesterday's inquiry report concluded: "The most striking failure was in the disconnection between what was happening on the wards at night, and what the board knew."

This is not good enough. One of the times when hospital patients are at their most vulnerable is at night when there is a skeleton staff on duty – and no visitors to call for help if necessary.

This is not just an issue for Airedale Hospital. It applies to the NHS in its entirety. Targets can only tell patients so much about an hospital. It is the quality of care – and the procedures followed on the wards – that matter most of all. Any changes to future inspection regimes need to remedy this oversight.