Baroness Featherstone (LD)

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Brinton because I believe we need much greater accountability at the top of NHS trusts. We have seen too many cases where serious concerns about patient safety have been raised, sometimes repeatedly, but those responsible for running the organisation have failed to act. Too often, protecting an institution’s reputation has taken priority over addressing the problem. I would like to give a personal example. Many of your Lordships will have heard of Baby Peter—“Baby P”—who died in the Tottenham side of Haringey. I was the MP for the other side, Hornsey and Wood Green. Baby Peter was taken to a clinic in Haringey where the doctor failed to notice a variety of injuries. Great Ormond Street had set up that clinic because they needed to demonstrate outreach work to get foundation status. At that clinic, it was a junior doctor who failed to notice the many injuries. Three of the four doctors at that clinic were not there: one had left and two were on gardening leave. They had been made to sign non-disclosure agreements. The one junior doctor who was left there to work pretty much on her own was the one who saw Baby Peter and failed. Together with Tim Donovan of BBC London, as it then was, we found that Great Ormond Street had commissioned a secret investigation, called the Sibert–Hodes report. It found them wanting. It found them guilty of employing a junior doctor who was so underqualified—it was unspeakable, what happened. I am sure you all know the story. Great Ormond Street hid that report. They failed to disclose it. I went to the board; I presented to the board; the board told me to get lost, basically. The chair of the board was not having any of it. All the members of the board were silent about what was happening. We all know what happened. I think this goes to the heart of institutions that are considered too important or too big to fail. That is what we seek to address with this amendment, which would place clear responsibilities on NHS boards and individual board members to report evidence of systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoing and require trusts to publish codes of conduct setting out what is expected of those in charge. That seems to me entirely reasonable. Staff who raise concerns about patient safety should know that those concerns will be taken seriously and that responsibility does not stop somewhere below board level. I will end by saying that this is a real-life, real-time example of what we are talking about. I am sure it is not an isolated occurrence of things being kept secret and the truth being hidden to save the reputation of a wonderful hospital like Great Ormond Street. They could have been even more wonderful if they had said that they had found a problem and had got a grip on it.