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The making of a whistleblower
What makes a whistleblower? This is the question I asked myself, sitting in the audience at the HSJ Patient Safety Congress in 2023. Peter Duffy, consultant urological surgeon, had spoken frankly...
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The simplest task? Misidentification in healthcare
The Health Service Journal has published data (subscription required) detailing the number of patient misidentifications in the NHS. The numbers are staggering. Responses to Freedom of Information...
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Deja Vu: half a century of NHS inquiries
In 1965, just 17 years after the NHS was created, a trained psychotherapist called Barbara Robb went to visit a previous client, Amy Gibbs (74), who had been admitted to Friern hospital, Barnet (a...
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The retrial of Lucy Letby
It is with grim fascination that I have observed a gradual but unmistakable swell of concern develop around the safety of Lucy Letby’s guilty verdict given in August 2023. In May 2024 the New Yorker...
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Intervention – why are rogue surgeons not stopped sooner?
As Søren Kierkegaard wrote, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ This aphorism sprang to mind when I read about the disgraced paediatric orthopaedic surgeon Yaser...
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‘The NHS is broken’– rhetoric & risk
The newly installed health secretary Wes Streeting was quick to state that the NHS is broken. This, he elaborated later, is the diagnosis and we must accept it if we are to implement the correct...
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Complexity and Parliament – the limits of assisted dying debate
I attended an interesting and important meeting about the assisted dying (AD) this week. The complex life and death decisions group (CLADD), hosted by King’s College London, arranged a panel...
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‘…9 years’– a review of ‘Outpatient’
Last week I watched Outpatient, a solo show at Park Theatre, Finsbury Park. Harriet Madeley presented an alternate version of herself, Olive, founded in reality but heightened and exaggerated in...
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Highlights from the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill’s third reading.
Parliament debated assisted dying (the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill) on 20th June 2025. This was the third reading of Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill and it passed. The number of...
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Letby: accountability and leadership
The news that ex-senior managers at the Countess of Chester hospital have been arrested on the charge of gross negligence manslaughter will undoubtedly send shivers through many NHS staff. They were...
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