Comment Refusing to face the crucial question of compassion

It is shocking that horsemeat for days grabbed the headlines, displacing the Francis Report on unnecessary deaths in NHS care. As taxpayers, as Christians, as members of society and the human race we should face up to the Mid Staffs Inquiry, and can easily do so at http://www.midstaffsinquiry.com/pressrelease.html. Volume 2 of the report gives the vast list of incidents complained about by patients, their relatives, their MPs and others, and these make astonishing and grisly reading. The humiliation of aged people left in unspeakable conditions, left without water and having to drink what was in their vases of flowers, diabetics fatally given the wrong medication, contempt and insults dished out to patients, the horror story goes on. It was convenient for government, opposition and media to move swiftly on rather than face this. And it was convenient to blame ‘the system’ and not to probe more deeply into why suffering patients could be given cruel care in NHS wards and on such a scale. Francis blamed the shortage of nursing staff and chronic managerial ignoring of ‘whistleblowing’ as two major causes of the crisis. Warnings issued by the HealthCare Commission had been ignored. A policy of targets needing to be met at all costs, never mind the effects on actual patients in beds, was also mentioned as a cause.

Mr Francis QC sometimes uses the language of ‘fundamentals’, as if grasping after some foundational quality needed in any health care organisation. But perhaps more important to him is a ‘duty of candour’ by the professionals about failings, rather than going deeper into promoting the quality of caring and compassion in all NHS officers, being managers, doctors, nurses and health care assistants. That seems to be the elephant in the room being avoided in the report and responses to it. The training of nurses went into the polytechnics, off the wards, away from the apprenticeship system of inducting new nurses into the tradition of care and putting the patient first. No one is asking the question whether this was the fault line leading to the present situation. Indeed if that was a disastrous policy mistake, academicising nursing away from practical care, our political masters are making it even worse by insisting that nursing become an ‘all graduate profession’ very soon.

Placements as observers on wards are no substitute for being integrated into the ward practice from day one of training, to gain the ethos of care as utterly vital. When questioned about how, or whether, nurses were trained for incontinent patients by Rosie Cooper MP, Jane Cummings ‘Chief Nursing Officer for the NHS in England’, shocked MPs by answering that she did not know details of their undergraduate training, (see select committee on nursing, 22 Jan qn 96). Moving nurse training from the wards and the tradition rooted in Christian vir tue of care, we can now see, was a disaster for the general public. But it suits none of our political parties even to ask the question, perhaps because it opens up the question of ‘the costs of de-Christianisation’?