NHS correspondence review puts safety first | Letters

Your leading article (1 March) was wrong to suggest the government has not prioritised patient safety in the handling of a serious failure by NHS Shared Business Services to deliver patient correspondence. We set up a national incident team immediately, reviewed every piece of correspondence and have nearly completed a second clinical review of all the higher-risk cases. So far no patient harm has been identified. I was advised last March not to make the issue public because it could have led to GP surgeries being deluged with queries by patients, slowing down the vital work of going through the higher-risk cases. I then chose, against advice, to highlight the issue in a statement to parliament before summer recess as I felt it was important that MPs were informed – and far from minimising the issue, it was described as a serious incident in my department’s annual report and accounts.

But where your article was right was in saying that improving patient safety cannot be a matter of rhetoric alone. The NHS deserves credit for making huge progress on patient safety over recent years. Since Mid Staffs, 31 trusts have been put into special measures, and 16 have come out – seven of them now with “good” ratings. MRSA rates have halved since 2010 – and are now lower than France, Germany or Spain. Stillbirths are down 10% and neonatal deaths down 14%. Your leader urged ministers to learn the lessons on safety taught by the airline industry – and we are. Next month, we will launch the Healthcare Safety Investigations Branch to give the NHS independent safety reports modelled on the way air crashes are investigated. And today we are publishing plans to reform the litigation process when children suffer a brain injury at birth so we get earlier compensation to families and avoid legal processes which prevent appropriate lessons being learned.

My ambition as health secretary is simple: I want our NHS to be the safest and highest-quality healthcare system in the world. That this progress is happening despite significant pressures on the frontline is a tribute to NHS staff working very hard in exceptionally tough circumstances.
Jeremy Hunt MP
Health secretary

NHS correspondence review puts safety first | Letters