Hospitals on danger list:
Concerns for patients prompt GMC to place scores of establishments under ‘special measures’
ALMOST 80 hospitals have been placed under surveillance by health watchdogs over concerns about patient safety and their ability to train doctors.
The General Medical Council said it had taken the “special measures” as part of efforts to prevent a repeat of the Mid Staffs scandal.
The regulator stepped in after finding alarming levels of bullying, handover systems so poor that desperately ill patients got “lost” and left at risk of serious harm during weekends, unman- ageable workloads and bed shortages in intensive care.
Niall Dickson, the GMC’s chief executive, said: “We are here to protect patients, not doctors.
“We are not part of the medical establishment, as we might have been seen in the past.”
The GMC took on responsibility for the quality of training of junior doctors in 2010, in the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal, where short staffing meant some junior doctors were left to cope with vast numbers of patients.
In total, 79 hospitals – around one in four of those in Britain – have now been placed under “enhanced monitoring”.
This measure is only used when a hospital has failed to improve after local concerns have been raised, and if the GMC feels the quality of training could put patients in danger or significantly damage doctors’ training. Mr Dickson described the process as “a form of special measures”.
In June, it issued this threat to one of London’s busiest hospitals, after finding patients placed at “serious risk”.
Soon after that, the North Middlesex Hospital was branded “inadequate” and its chief executive forced to resign after inspectors found a litany of failings – including a dead body which went unnoticed in Accident & Emergency for four and a half hours.
The new data show that hospitals from 63 trusts across the UK have been placed under the measures, including hospitals which have been barred from employing trainee doctors because their standards are so poor.
The database shows that at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in King’s Lynn, Norfolk acutely ill patients were found to be getting “lost” with no one responsible for them because of failings in handover systems at nights and at weekends.
Inspections of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London found “serious and persistent concerns” about patient safety in children’s cancer services and haematology – resulting in eight train- ing posts being suspended in 2014. A Great Ormond Street spokesman said it had put an action plan in place and placements would resume next month.
Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge is under close supervision over shortages of doctors working in ophthalmology, poor training, and “inappropriate” and “undermining” behaviour from consultants.
The GMC said the major teaching hospital had fallen behind on its plans to tackle the problems, which stem from warnings dating back to 2014.
“We won’t hesitate to take action and blow the whistle if we are not happy,” Mr Dickson told Health Service Journal. “Educational problems can be the canary down the mine.”
At Barts Hospital in London, trainee paediatric doctors warned last year that they were being forced to work dangerously long shifts, and threatened by consultants that if they refused they would be reported to the GMC.
Mr Dickson said the GMC was “absolutely different in size, scale ambition and responsibilities” since the Stafford Hospital scandal, and now took a more proactive stance in uncovering problems. “Mid Staffs told us more than anything else that you have to be on the pitch, you can’t sit in the tower and say ‘Well, nobody told us,’” he said.
NHS Regulators in England are currently drawing up a formal list of hospital departments which will be closed amid the worst financial crisis in the history of the health service, with a record £2.45 billion deficit reported last year.
Hospitals will embark on a “glut” of closures, with A&E units and key services for the elderly among those to be stripped and centralised, in coming months.
In recent weeks, a number of A&E units have already closed, restricted their hours, or stopped treating children, because of concern about safety risks amid widespread shortages of doctors.