Improving patient safety should “permeate every action and level in the NHS”, says a major review following the Stafford Hospital scandal.
Changing the culture of the NHS will “trump” any new rules and strategies, pledges the study, from former adviser to US president Barack Obama, Professor Don Berwick, a world expert in patient safety.
He set out a series of measures, including criminal sanctions for staff who wilfully neglect patients and adopt a “couldn’t care less attitude”.
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He said yesterday: “Where there is wilful or reckless neglect of patients there needs to be consequences.”
But he stressed sanctions should only be used for a “very small number of cases”.
Prof Berwick stopped short of saying staff should be bound by law to report beliefs about serious incidents. That is already included in professional codes of conduct.
The Government-ordered report said: “Achieving a vastly safer NHS will depend far more on major cultural change than on a new regulatory regime.”
Patient safety and quality of care should come above all other aims of the NHS, it said, and “nothing will be more important than the voice of parents and carers.”
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Prof Berwick reiterated calls for a review of staffing ratios so wards are never too short of staff to care for patients.
Prof Berwick was tasked by Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this year with conducting a root-and-branch safety review of English hospitals. He believes the NHS could offer the “safest healthcare in the world”.
He wants the scandal at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would normally have been expected, to act as a catalyst to drive improvements.
Mid Staffordshire was at the centre of a public inquiry into Stafford Hospital, where hundreds of patients were routinely neglected.
Led by Robert Francis QC, the inquiry reported earlier this year, highlighting the “appalling and unnecessary suffering of hundreds of people”.
The findings prompted a separate review, led by NHS medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, of 14 NHS hospitals in England with high death rates.
As a result of that review, 11 hospitals were placed in special measures for “fundamental breaches of care”.