I can still hear Shaun, from My Life My Choice, asking this question at the extraordinary (extraordinary) board meeting back in January:

Oh Katrina, you were clearly struggling. Why didn’t you ask for help?

While she has been strongly defending her leadership this week of course Percy ain’t a lone ranger and has a board and a council of governors to support her/ensure good governance. She also received offers of help from outside the trust. Gary Walker contacted her back in December, for example. You can’t accept help though if you don’t think you need it. And despite Shaun’s wise words, Percy continues to deny failings.  To the extent she refers to “alleged ‘failings'” in her latest report to the board.

This truly astonishing position, so far from any whiff of candour and transparency, makes me wonder how many senior bods in NHS England and the like have toe curling moments reading repeated Sloven protestations.

The jury determination at LB’s inquest was not alleged ‘failings’. The Mazars report does not contain alleged ‘failings’. The CQC  warning this week makes it clear that there are longstanding failings:

We found longstanding risks to patients, arising from the physical environment, that had not been dealt with effectively. The Trust’s internal governance arrangements to learn from serious incidents or investigations were not good enough, meaning that opportunities to minimise further risks to patients were lost.

[Howl]

The Sloven response to the warnings issued this week are so blinkingly similar to their response to the warning they received in March 2014. With no apparent reflection they are simply repeating the shite they dredged up two years ago.

The CQC state longstanding risks, Percy talks about recent concerns. The CQC say action was only taken by Sloven as a result of the warning notice. Percy says good progress has been made. In both responses, Percy talks about “agreement” with Monitor/NHS Improvement about what needs to be done. And takes them both “extremely seriously”. In 2014, she is going to sort it all out “over the coming weeks”. In 2016, “I, and the Board, remain completely focused on tackling these concerns as quickly as possibly”. Jaw dropping spin exposed again by Ally Rogers.

Back in December, when the Mazars report was published, Percy argued the trust wasn’t an outlier in not reviewing the deaths of certain patients. An argument so wrong given the content of the report it continues to baffle. Really? Did she really say that? In a typical Sloven move, she/they also tried to position the trust as leading the way in improving death reporting at this point. This extract from an ITV report;

Spin extraordinaire. Complete billy bullshit. And George Julian laid the ‘not an outlier’ argument well and truly to rest with a monumental analysis of trust responses to the Mazars review published yesterday. George’s post demonstrates that many trusts are doing a good job (thank fuck). And responses to the Mazars report you’d  expect [in the real world that is, not Sloven spin city]. That is, a determination to scrutinise current processes to make sure they are effective. How we are still dealing with this tinpot bunch of exec muppets who clearly wouldn’t know what ‘Deliver improvements in our quality governance and Board governance’ [2014] means, remains beyond me.