Half of NHS hospitals failing
to meet safety standards
Only half of NHS trusts meet safety standards according to the latest State of Healthcare annual report from the independent Healthcare Commission watchdog.
Announcing the report The Times (11 December) quoted Healthcare Commission chairman, Sir Ian Kennedy as saying: "In my view the NHS is really only just out of the starting blocks - there's a great deal to do before we can be confident that the care patients receive is as safe as it reasonably can be," although he also praised the progress that had been made in the NHS.
The Patients Association has been critical of NHS hospital standards too. On 25 November it expressed its dismay at the continuing failure to protect patients, and on breaches of the Hygiene Code.
Then, on 23 December, its vice president, Sir Richard Branson, compared the risk of death from an unassociated event in an NHS hospital - at 1 in 300 - with the I in 10 million risk of death as an airline passenger, and said that if the NHS were an airline it would have been closed down on safety grounds.
"In the airline industry if we had that kind of track record we would have been grounded years ago," he said.
The Patients Association argues that every patient on a planned hospital admission has a right to know four facts about the ward or department:
- The healthcare acquired infection (HAI) rate
- The patient/staff ratio
- The bed occupancy rate
- Whether or not patients and staff are screened (for infections).
See www.patients-association.org.uk/news and www.healthcarecommission.org.uk/newsandevents for more information.
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