Jane Hanna: First of all, your concern about patient safety overall completely resonates with me.
My partner died after his fourth seizure, and after three emergency admissions and there was no support in terms of engagement and national targets bypass conditions like epilepsy. My question is in relation to people with long term conditions. You have said you don’t want to dictate, but my question is, how do you really see the Department of Health supporting those developments? We would like to see care plans, communication, but also engagement after a sudden unexpected death where lessons could be learned, but can the Department of Health actually support those sorts of initiatives?
Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley: ‘In relation to epilepsy, it is very important as we move to a focus we don’t lose sight of some of the diseases that sometimes the targets have ignored. That is why it is not going to be easy. I can’t end up with this enormous list of targets, let us say instead of one hundred targets let us have 200, 300, 400.
Let us be quite clear, including a disease like epilepsy what constitutes the quality of care. That is not about targets, it is about looking through the clinical evidence and trying to establish what constitutes an expectation of service.
But then I think in terms of what we hold the NHS to account for is that patients should be able to experience improving outcomes. If we can’t do it in any other way, particularly for people with long-term conditions, what are their patient reported outcomes and what to what extent is it delivering patient improvements? To that extent patient reported outcomes is one of the central developments that we need, to be able to hold the whole service better to account.
You are absolutely right about serious incidents and deaths in circumstances where they were avoidable, there should always be a basis not only on which the NHS learns but where the NHS is very open to families about discussing what happened and why it happened because that actually is not only an open culture we learn from better.
I know from talking to many patients in the whole humanity issues back in 2004, that one of the things that actually drove many of the families to the point where they were undertaking legal action was that they just felt that the service was not listened to, that the service was not engaging properly.
I think we will minimise the impact of clinical negligence claims upon the NHS, if we have a more open sharing of information and fact finding rather than simply people having to establish it through legal process. It does not mean we insulate ourselves.
The truth of the matter is that issues like clinical negligence the NHS is accountable, can be required to pay compensation, even where criminal negligence is concerned. The NHS is not in a separate position and that it is a possible legal route for holding people to account. But I would like to think that we can create accountability mechanisms through the NHS that are stronger than that and don’t resort to legal action’.
