A public inquiry sounds like it could give publicity and accountability we want. So I thought I’d try to explain a bit more on why it is not what we need. Hopefully this helps people understand the position, it’s largely based in the weird nuances of process and some political geekery.
In short they are long slow, expensive and often sprawling processes which don’t necessarily lead to anything. As
@Trish covers they often have a bit of a ‘listening to all sides’ and weighing up different arguments aspect and they’re can be used to kick things into the long grass rather than make decisions.
Do we really want to hear ‘we are awaiting the results of the public inquiry’ in response to every question or call for change for the next 5+ years and also spend the millions we could instead use to fund SequenceME or other research?
The IfG has written extensively on the problems and the HoC library has a recent report too
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/public-inquiries
So what could we do instead?
IMHO we need to be clearly focused on the lack of care for the most severe, why this and avoidable harms and tragedies continue to happen, what processes the NHS has in place to deal with the most severely affected and if they don’t (we know they don’t) then they need to fix that.
This is doable now. We largely need the will and someone to be made responsible for change. That would have a strong clear message of recognition and intent, improve the situation for some and give us all something to build upon. Make solving this someone’s job, both politically (assign a minister) and practically (assign a senior civil servant and someone in NHS England and each of the other regions to ensure ICBs deliver).
We have had inquests and prevention of future deaths reports already. They should have clout but need acting upon. The responses from the relevant parts of the NHS needs to be scrutinised, the message that continuing as things are is unacceptable made clear and anything positive rolled out nationally.
A focussed parliamentary select committee inquiry could give as much public visibility as a public inquiry and could also bring in experts and ask some hard questions of government and the NHS. This would have the advantage of being parliamentary rather than ministerial and cross party too.
The Health Secretary could just set up a similarly focused or time limited review if they deemed this issue important. They clearly haven’t until now.
Maybe there are other NHS processes too, I’m not as familiar or sure how useful they’d be. But ideally, if we want change, we’d remove finger pointing and blame and focus on the systemic problems and implementation of fixes. But someone needs to be given responsibility for doing so, responsibility for us. That’s the heart of the problem and why we’re left, we are nobody’s problem.
