[Courtesy: The Daily Telegraph]
Both your Tuesday headline (“Gag order ban for NHS staff who blow whistle”) and your leading article (“A transparent NHS”) highlight important issues regarding the way NHS services are delivered.
NHS managers and politicians are poles apart in their vision of what should be delivered and how it should be done. Politicians want quantity, not necessarily quality, to convince voters that services are being delivered. Trust managers, though, can’t be seen to be providing poor or dangerous services, as they might risk their jobs or see a trust put into special measures.
This means that as long as some service can be delivered – regardless of the quality of that service – then the problem will continue.
Dr P.L. Riley (retd),
Stourbridge, West Midlands
