Thirty-seven patients die needlessly each day in the NHS. Change is good, but patient safety must come first.
So as long as scrapping NHS England does not mean replacing bureaucratic overcentralisation with political overcentralisation, Wes Streeting is on the right track. The biggest area of risk is NHS maternity units. The bill for settling litigation claims for maternity issues has risen to nearly £2bn a year. In the decade up to the start of the pandemic, the NHS made real strides in reducing baby deaths and stillbirths, but the latest data suggests that they are going back up.
A major investigation by the midwife and community activist Donna Ockenden into maternity services at Nottingham University hospitals trust is uncovering some harrowing failures of care. But even more worrying is that those failures appear to be part of a pattern: she found the same issues at Shrewsbury and Telford in her 2020 report. Dr Bill Kirkup found similar things going wrong in his reports on East Kent in 2022 and Morecambe Bay in 2015″.