Professor John Robertson OBA

It’s a bit much, Jeremy Hunt now worrying about patient safety, 15 years after he could have learned how to do it, 18 years after Labour could have, from SNP-led Scotland.

In the Guardian, yesterday, the above, and:

I am worried about something else being missed. In the huge blizzard of organisational change, there is a risk of eyes going off the ball when it comes to broader patient safety risks. In December, the charity I set up, Patient Safety Watch, published a report put together by a team of people at Imperial College London led by Prof Ara Darzi. It suggested that if our standards were as high as the top 10% of OECD countries, every year fewer patients would die. Twelve out of 22 patient safety metrics have been going in the wrong direction in the past two years. It is a wake-up call about the tragedy of avoidable death, highlighted magnificently by Merope Mills in her successful campaign for Martha’s rule after the tragic loss of her daughter. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/24/nhs-reform-wes-streeting-labour-jeremy-hunt

Neither Jeremy nor Prof Darzi thought to look north but rather scoured the OECD for ideas and for context.

Had they looked north, what might they have found?

Leading European expert says Scotland is ‘at the very top pillar with regards to patient safety’ since 2007

From BBC Scotland, December 26^th 2024, after their ignorant and tasteless Christmas Eve attack, with the Scottish Cons and Labour’s Jackie Baillie, on the reputation of the staff at the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank, they’re back at it again today with more inaccurate reporting, this time on patient safety, with:

A recruitment drive for Scotland’s first ever Patient Safety Commissioner has failed for a second time. MSPs passed a law creating the new independent public advocate for NHS patients in September last year.

The first round of interviews for the £89,685-a-year role in April failed to produce a suitable candidate and then last month a second round of interviews saw the preferred person then turn the job down. Campaigners have described the latest delay as “incredibly frustrating”.

Dr Henrietta Hughes was appointed as England’s patient safety commissioner in 2022, external.

Looks bad doesn’t it? How long before an opposition MSP tweets to blame the SNP for this?

Far less time than it will take any of them to tell you this, about patient safety in NHS Scotland:

From the Westminster (UK Parliament) Health Committee, in January 2022:

The Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP), introduced by the SNP Scottish Government in 2007, has been praised by a leading European expert on patient safety.

In Westminster’s Health Committee, Dr Pelle Gustafson, CMO at Swedish Patient Insurer, responded with “Scotland”, when he was asked which country he would hold at the very top pillar with regards to patient safety. 

Dr Gustfason said: “If you take all preventative work in regard to patient safety, I would say Scotland, I am personally very impressed with Scotland. I think in Scotland you have a long tradition of working, you have a development in the right direction and you also have a system which is fairly equal all over the place. You have improvement activities going on. So I am very impressed by Scotland”. https://mobile.twitter.com/DrGregorSmith/status/1481211002301685760

How long has England not had a ‘top tier’ patient safety programme?

The 30 year-long neglect of patient safety in NHS England exposed as SNP Government records 17 years of its ‘at the very top pillar’ safety programme first launched by Nicola Sturgeon

In May 2024, the Health Editor at the Sunday Times reported:

Why don’t things get better on #patientsafety? One reason is that the NHS & government do sweet FA to act on inquiry recommendations. The @Thirlwall_Inq [led by a senior judge] has published a comprehensive assessment of the last 30 years of inquiries. It is not a good read: https://t.co/OWSCa7AXEn