Sir David Nicholson didn’t deliver the most confident performance before the Health Select Committee this morning, but he didn’t leave the session looking fatally wounded. Here are the key points from his evidence:
1. No-one knew what was going on.
The NHS is such a big organisation that, as Nicholson admitted, it was perfectly possible for the Strategic Health Authority that he oversaw had no idea that there were concerns about the Mid-Staffordshire Trust. He said:
‘We had no idea, the information was never brought to the SHA… we didn’t see any of the information that would lead you to believe that this was going on, shocking as it is.’
He added that ‘there was no culture of sharing information’. On the mortality rates which should have alerted bosses to problems at Stafford Hospital, he said: ‘Part of the problem was that people got obsessed with the measure.’ There wasn’t a response from the Trust to the high death rates that involved bosses going through notes and examining why more patients were dying at the hospital than expected, he said.
2.
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