It never fails to amaze me how certain policy strands run in parallel along a disastrous course, but silos in journalism mean that you’ll never get people joining the dots.

One example of this is the competitive tendering in legal services which Chris Grayling MP is currently shoehorning through, despite overwhelming opposition from lawyers including QCs. Everytime the unemployment figures up, or we have another revival in youth employment, Chris Grayling used to be the guy on TV saying that ‘every statistic is of course a personal tragedy’. Curiously you never get this phrase said about any excess death from the NHS which happened out of the ordinary. The concept that it is impossible to measure excess deaths at all will be alien to any professional in clinical negligence, who will be able to follow through the well-worn logic of duty-of-care of a clinician, failure of that duty causing breach, and that breach causing damage provided that there is not remoteness. We all know that the media is prone to hysteria, and indeed John Prescott once advised me not to believe everything written about ‘one’ in the papers. And an issue undoubtedly is that some are using what happened at Mid Staffs for their own agendas. You’d be forgiven for thinking some reports have the sole intention of shutting down the entire NHS as a national health service, blow all its credibility to smithereens, and to prepare its purchase price for the lowest bidder in a Government which has relish in outsourcing and privatisating the State infrastructure.

However, the sensationalism which was embraced whether there were any ‘excess deaths’ or not is perhaps distasteful at best, and frankly rude at worst. Mortality ratios are supposed to be the ‘smoke alarm’, but now that the inferno has happened, it is not time to remove the batteries from the smoke detector. The public inquiries at Mid Staffs I feel were essential. I don’t feel that this is an issue which could have been discussed behind closed doors ‘in camera’. It might be feasible to hold no-one accountable as the ‘culture’ is so widespread, but that has not led professionals to escape liability ever before for fundamental breaches in care, such as poor note-keeping, unprompt investigations, poor conduct and communication, from the professional regulators. The frustration has been there appears to have been very little accountability, and this is significant whether one feels the role of the justice system should be fundamentally restorative, retributive or rehabilitative. A certain amount of hysteria has instead engulfed proceedings at Mid Staffs, with the recently reported hostile behaviour towards Julie Bailey, remarkable campaigner and founder of ‘Cure the NHS’.

However, Julie has never wanted to ‘Kill the NHS’, but is deeply hurt about what happened to her Mum. Deb Hazeldine is very hurt about what happened to her mum. Any reasonable daughter would. These are times for reports of personal tragedies. Whilst we all have to move on, it is important to acknowledge accurately the distress of what happened, and this is precisely what we achieved in the Francis Inquiries. The accounts in those Inquiries are not figments of anyone’s imagination. It is even possible that we may have to learn from what happened there for other NHS Trusts. There is a trail of logic which goes that ‘efficiency savings’ were in fact cuts which included relative staff shortages, despite more being spent on the NHS budget overall including for salaries for certain personnel; this meant that key critical frontline staff were overstretched, there were genuine clinical events in patient safety which went beyond ‘near misses’, but they were not adequately dealt with. The Francis Inquiries should not be used to draw closure on the matters for the Labour administration, which I broadly supported. The reaction to the situation, a real one of personal tragedy, should not in my view a retweet of a blog which says that standard mortality ratios are unreliable, however correct that blog might be. This for me is not in any way personal – I like and respect very much people on all sides of what has been a highly charged discussion. I have known some of them for ages, and I will continue to support them publicly and in private.

We are not at the end of the solution of what happened in Mid Staffs, and for the time-being we should honestly recognise that.