Time for a culture change in the NHS?
Elliot Bidgood, 9 August 2013
Today Dr Christoph Lees, Dr Mark Slack and Magnus Boyd of the Doctors’ Policy Research Group (DPRG) are calling attention to the need for a fundamental change in the NHS’s culture and the way in which it is managed in the wake of the Keogh report, which led to 11 NHS trusts being placed under special measures due to problems with governance and care standards. This of course came on the heels of the revelations regarding poor care at Mid Staffordshire in February, after which NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson had said that the problems were not a “systemic” issue.
Furthermore, the DPRG have called attention to the failure of other senior officials in the NHS to adequately challenge Sir Nicholson’s claims and to the failure of both managers and clinicians to live up to their professional obligation to speak out against lapses. They propose two common-sense steps to change the NHS’s internal culture for the better:
- Put doctors and nurses back in charge of the NHS and resist the slide towards more top-down regulation and ‘corporatisation’ in the service
- Appoint an outsider as the new NHS England Chief Executive to ensure real change – as NHS England board chairman Sir Malcolm Grant has said, this has already worked well for the Bank of England and neither being British nor having a background in health need be a “prerequisite“
If these two steps are followed, the DPRG are confident that real change can be realised in the NHS and an ailing service can be healed.
Their commentary can be read in full here. For more information about the Doctors’ Policy Research Group visit their webpage here.