The poor care, medical errors and management blunders of 14 NHS trusts, including Tameside, are set to be revealed by NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh in a report tomorrow.
The report will state that 14 trusts have had an ‘excess’ of deaths going back years and will publish the numbers of so-called ‘never events’, such as operations on the wrong part of the body or surgical instruments left inside a patient, according to the Sunday Telegraph.
This is the second major dent to Tameside’s public profile in a fortnight following the resignation of Christine Green, the trust’s £150,000-a-year chief executive.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “We are not prepared to speculate about the contents of Sir Bruce’s review, or our response to it.
“We’ve shown consistently that we expect the NHS to be accountable where things go wrong.
“That is why the Prime Minister ordered an investigation to get to the bottom of these issues.”
The political fallout of the report has already begun as Tories are preparing to seize on the findings and attack Labour’s health care record.
Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham, who served under the last Labour government, said that he would defend his record and the decisions he made.
“I will account for all of the things I did as secretary of state,” he said.
“I took actions to reveal what happened at Stafford, I took actions at Basildon, at Tameside, I left warnings in place on five hospitals.”
However, Professor Brian Jarman, an independent expert on mortality rates who was an advisor on the report suggested that Labour presided over a ‘denial machine.’
Speaking to Sky News he said: “When they had a problem with quality, they couldn’t really say what it was, so things were suppressed…spin.”
The ramifications of the report in an already tumultuous time for Tameside are unclear, however, a statement from the trust is expected tomorrow afternoon.
Picture courtesy of NHS Confederation via Flickr, with thanks.
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