If you really love the NHS, you know it needs to change

To adapt Aeschylus’s aphorism on war and truth, the first casualty in a general election campaign is objectivity. Over the next eight weeks NHS staff can expect nothing but saccharine praise from politicians who are falling over themselves to say how wonderful the health service is, how committed they are to it. The Conservatives may revive their ‘NH-yes’ slogan, promising to safeguard its budget. Labour proposes to protect it from what few reforms the Conservatives promise and even Ukip is posing as ‘the party of the NHS’. A true friend of the NHS, however, would accept that all is not well, and that ‘protecting’ its current structure is an act of cruelty rather than kindness. We saw why this week in Bill Kirkup’s report into the scandal of the unnecessary deaths of 11 babies and one mother at the maternity unit of Furness General Hospital between 2004 and 2013. The unit, he concludes, was ‘dysfunctional’, with staff ‘deficient in skills and knowledge’. One baby, Joshua Titcombe, succumbed to an infection which staff had ample opportunity to diagnose but failed to do so. Expectant mothers with dangerous conditions were sent home with inadequate treatment. On one occasion an epidural injection — supposed to be given into the spine — was administered intravenously. Bureaucratic edicts crushed the common sense of nurses: a policy of insisting on natural childbirth was pursued ‘at any cost’, even when circumstances ought to have demanded a caesarean. But worse than any of these errors, in some respects, was the failure of the Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Furness and two other general hospitals, to recognise that there was a problem. The author of an ‘independent’ report commissioned by the trust was instructed not to revisit the circumstances of serious incidents. Midwives rallied round and covered for each others’ failures, referring to themselves as the ‘musketeers’.