Why these squalid cover-ups? Because no politician dare admit the terrible truth about the NHS

PUBLISHED: 23:10, 23 June 2013 | UPDATED: 13:06, 24 June 2013
When Kay Sheldon (pictured) tried to air her concerns about the CQC, her messages to chief executive Cynthia Bower and other board members were not answered, or were stonewalled
When Kay Sheldon (pictured) tried to air her concerns about the CQC, her messages to chief executive Cynthia Bower and other board members were not answered, or were stonewalled
So now, having had the inquiry into the inquiry that suppressed facts about the failure of the original inquiry, there is to be a further inquiry into the bullying of the woman who tried to blow the whistle on the uselessness — and worse — of the inquirers.
Really, the saga of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has progressed from tragedy through scandal to farce, and has now plumbed astonishing new depths of moral and political squalor.
For at the weekend, after the revelations of the cover-up over deaths from negligence at Morecambe Bay hospitals, we learned just what happened to Kay Sheldon, a non-executive director at the CQC, when she tried to bring to light failings at the regulator which were putting patients’ lives at risk.
And now we also know — just as had been suspected from the start — that the culture of bullying, intimidation and lies in the NHS reached to the very top.
When Ms Sheldon tried to air her concerns that the CQC wasn’t up to the task of uncovering bad practice in hospitals and care homes, her messages to chief executive Cynthia Bower and other board members were not answered, or were stonewalled.
In despair, Ms Sheldon decided to speak out at the public inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire Trust, where 1,200 patients had died needlessly through the incompetence and negligence of the staff.
As a result, the CQC’s chairman, Dame Jo Williams, wrote to then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley asking him to sack her.
Worse still, Ms Sheldon discovered that Dame Jo had commissioned a psychiatric report on her without her permission and that she was described — wholly falsely — as a paranoid schizophrenic.
It was, of course, the old Soviet Union which was given to silencing its critics by certifying them as insane.
 

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The CQC seemed to be run by Stalin on steroids.
But this ruthless approach to dissent went all the way up to the Cabinet. At the weekend, it was revealed that after receiving a CQC report on Ms Sheldon’s Mid Staffs evidence, Andrew Lansley told her he was considering her dismissal.
How shocking that this supposed guardian of the public interest seemed not to have wondered whether Ms Sheldon might be correct and that patients were indeed at risk. Instead, he cavalierly assumed that the very body about which she was complaining must be in the clear.
Further revelations about this cover-up culture in the National Health Service are now coming thick and fast. A former CQC inspector, Amanda Pollard, has claimed she wrote two letters to Ms Bower expressing safety concerns — but was ignored.
At the weekend, it was revealed that after receiving a CQC report on Ms Sheldon's Mid Staffs evidence, Andrew Lansley (pictured) told her he was considering her dismissal
At the weekend, it was revealed that after receiving a CQC report on Ms Sheldon's Mid Staffs evidence, Andrew Lansley (pictured) told her he was considering her dismissal
Roger Davidson lost his job as the CQC’s head of media and public affairs just before the 2010 General Election after revealing that one quarter of NHS trusts had failed to meet basic hygiene standards.
He was forced to sign a gagging order when he left and was told the CQC was ‘railing against’ his action to ‘highlight issues’.
Sir David Nicholson, the outgoing chief executive of the NHS, who was in charge of Mid Staffs when the scandal began to break, is reported to have spent £2 million on severance packages including gagging orders for 50 staff — which bought their silence about mismanagement.
Now the Labour Party has been dragged into the scandal, too, with claims that the CQC came under pressure from Labour ministers to tone down any criticisms in the run-up to the 2010 election.
The former Labour Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, has denied that he leaned on the CQC to sanitise its criticisms of Morecambe Bay hospitals.
But the then health secretary and now Labour's shadow health spokesman, told the health care regulator in November 2009 that its role was to 'restore public confidence in the NHS'.
Nicholson, who was in charge of Mid Staffs when the scandal began to break, is said to have spent £2 million on severance packages including gagging orders for 50 staff - buying their silence about mismanagement
Nicholson, who was in charge of Mid Staffs when the scandal began to break, is said to have spent £2 million on severance packages including gagging orders for 50 staff - buying their silence about mismanagement
And in her own evidence on Mid Staffs, the former CQC chairman Baroness Young said that health ministers — including Mr Burnham — had put the regulator under ‘pressure’ to ‘tone down’ its criticism of hospitals around that period.
This whole disaster goes back to the Gordon Brown government, which merged three failing NHS watchdogs to create the CQC in the teeth of warnings that this was asking for trouble.
The ensuing debacle was not just the result of a botched merger: it reflects an NHS culture which is profoundly, systemically and almost certainly irredeemably rotten.
At the very root lies an appalling litany of serial incompetence, indifference and even cruelty by front-line staff. Let us not forget the dreadful events themselves in Morecambe Bay hospitals, where at least 16 babies and two mothers are estimated to have died through neglect.
And in Mid Staffs, neglect and cruelty reached such a pitch that patients drank from flower vases to relieve their thirst.
 
  

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Now, 14 more hospitals are being investigated for unusually high death rates. And we know from example after sickening example that too many elderly patients are treated all too frequently with a callousness that defies belief.
While thousands of NHS staff are highly professional and dedicated, far too many have simply lost the ethic of caring.
And these failings are not being addressed; because what rules in the NHS, from top to bottom, is a culture of ruthless unaccountability in which the buck stops nowhere.  
Unpalatable as this may be to some, this goes back to Mrs Thatcher and her belief that all state provision was bad and that the preferable model was privatisation, with a regulator to enforce standards.
The problem was that she didn’t have the courage to follow through and say the NHS was no longer fit for purpose. Instead, she spatchcocked onto the NHS a semi-privatised model, with regulators.
The result of this incoherence was that patient care fell through the crack. 
Patients had no power to vote with their feet — as they do in insurance-based systems. Meanwhile, the regulators developed into a crazily spiralling bureaucracy answerable to no one and looking after their own interests instead.
This all got far worse under the Labour government, which seized the opportunity to cement often destructive power over the NHS, wielded from Whitehall, while washing their hands of responsibility when things went wrong. 
Instead, they dumped that burden upon the myriad quangos set up for that purpose —while wrapping themselves in the mantle of the potent NHS myth as Britain’s sanctified temple of compassion and altruism.
As a result, the entire service knew it had to conspire to pretend that everything was for the best in the best of all possible health care systems — and anyone trying to tell the truth was threatened with the sack, gagged when they left or otherwise bullied by amoral apparatchiks.
Kay Sheldon refused to be intimidated. For her heroic stand, she deserves a medal.
But the CQC cannot now be put right because the NHS cannot be put right. 
For the root of this moral and professional corruption is that the entire bureaucracy of the NHS — up through the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister himself — conspires to tell the public the big lie that the NHS remains a national treasure because no other system matches it for decency and compassion.
In fact, the opposite is true. And until that fact is honestly faced and its consequences translated into a radical rethink of healthcare delivery, the horror voiced in official circles at Morecambe Bay, Mid Staffs and the rest will be no more than crocodile tears.