Hospital notes 5 March

The head of the NHS has been ordered to explain why hospitals have been allowed to ‘cook their books’ on death rates. Sir David Nicholson was accused of letting managers routinely fiddle the figures to mask the numbers of patients dying needlessly.

• Last week a whistleblower claimed she was hired by the Royal Wolverhampton hospital trust to ‘fix’ its shockingly high death rates.
• The chief executive of another trust, Bolton University, has stepped aside over a possible cover-up.
• A number of trusts have been accused of deploying similar tactics – including Medway in Kent, George Eliot in Warwickshire and Walsall in the West Midlands.

MP Steve Barclay told the Commons it was highly unlikely Sir David would not have known of an unusually high number of complaints and abnormally elevated death rates at some trusts. Charlotte Leslie MP says

Ministers and officials knew vital data on death rates existed for as far back as 2001, yet the line to take was to deny all knowledge and keep pumping out their version of reality while patients died.

It’s absolutely vital the committee get to the bottom of this.

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Dr Sarah Wollaston MP writes convincingly in The Telegraph that Sir David Nicholson must go.

The chairman of the NHS thinks Nicholson is fundamental to the success of the hospital service. But Sir David has already failed. So is the hospital service manageable by mortal man at all? Or do we need (yet) another model for it?

So yes, Dr Wollaston makes an unanswerable case for Nicholson to depart. But what then?

Evidence is accumulating that the state can't run our hospitals properly. How many more proles will the state sacrifice before it admits that it can't itself run a humane and cost- effective hospital service?

Do other advanced countries kill so many of their proles to try (and fail) to make a political point?