What the NHS owes the Tories

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[/audioplayer]Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing that week’s ‘Never Events’. It catalogues the mistakes that have been made in NHS hospitals that should never have happened: people having the wrong leg amputated, swabs being left inside patients after surgery and the like. This grim list is a rebuke to the glib, Danny Boyle-style rhetoric which dominates all political debate about the NHS and treats any attempt to examine the failings of British health care as heresy.

One can’t imagine Andy Burnham, the last Labour health secretary and the shadow secretary of state, approving of Hunt’s decision to display this information so prominently. Earlier this month he accused the Health Secretary of being on a ‘mission to run down the health service’ so that it can be privatised. But Hunt’s decision to have this list up in his office would have been applauded by one of the NHS’s founders, Aneurin Bevan. Given that he wanted the clang of a dropped bedpan to reverberate in Whitehall, Bevan would surely have approved of the Health Secretary’s knowing of the worst mistakes made by the service.

Hunt is about as different personally and politically from Bevan as it is possible to be: he is the son of an admiral, not a coal miner, and a Thatcherite, not a socialist. He does, however, share Bevan’s desire to know what is happening inside every NHS hospital. He begins his day by reading, and replying to, a patient who has written to him about the care that they have received from the NHS.

These letters are behind Hunt’s latest proposal: he wants every patient in hospital to have a named doctor looking after them for their whole stay.