The Percy Problem?

Posted on October 29, 2017 by sarasiobhan

Oh my. A piece in the Mail on Sunday* today about Katrina Percy, former Sloven CEO, touting leadership expertise on LinkedIn. During twitter exchanges across the day I was bounced back to exchanges around our referral of Percy to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) for investigation under the Fit and Proper Person Regulation (FPPR) back in the day.

A right old dogs dinner that spanned more than 18 months. Littered with a remarkable number of non-responses. Demonstration of the disregard and disrespect bereaved families can expect from the NHS and wider bodies. Brutal non-responses…

2015
17 March 15 We refer Katrina Percy for investigation.
[No response.] Please reply even if only to say you’ve received the email. Families are in a terrible, brutalised position. To ignore is to simply add a size 10 Doc Marten kick in the gut to the experience.
27 May 15 I tweet about this non-response. Andrea Sutcliffe steps in to mediate. Good for Andrea but it shouldn’t take a tweet and the potential for reputational damage to generate action.
29 May 15 An apology from Mike Richards, then Head of Inspection, for the delay in response.
1 June 15 A letter from Richards with the panel decision:
Richards bollox

No words.

2016
3 Jan 16 After publication of the Mazars review we ask the CQC to reconsider their decision.
[No response.] As above. I tweet and Andrea Sutcliffe again steps in to mediate.  This flags up some communication type issues that really need addressing.
1 Mar 16 Email from Mike Richards’ executive PA to say our referral is tabled for the FPPR management review meeting on 11 Mar 16 and we’ll hear after that.
‘Thank you’ I reply. The differential in power laid starkly by the ‘thank you’ emails.
31 Mar 16 Hello, I email… Again.  Is there any news? As above.
1 Apr 16  Email from Paul Lelliot (Deputy Chief Inspector for Mental Health) to say the Chair, PA and Mike Richards are on annual leave. We should hear soon. A holding email takes about 1 minute to write and send. There is no excuse to piss off on leave and not reply.
4 Apr 16 The Chair replies:

The panel concluded that any further action should be considered once CQC had concluded our most recent review and have an understanding of the position of NHS Improvement in relation to the trust.

6 Apr 16 A warning notice (and no action) from the CQC is announced.
7 Apr 16 I email to ask what the CQC are going to do about Katrina Percy.
14 May 16 I chase up my email.
15 May 16 Apologies for not updating I’m told. We will provide an update shortly.
29 July 16 I email for an update. [Note we’re leaving gaps of 5/6 weeks before recontacting. The spectre of the vexatious family/mother ever present. This consideration is not even a whiff among CQC business. Kind of reminding me of a paper we wrote about the ringside seat autistic people can have to mainstream life with little or no reciprocated thought from mainstream society.]
29 July 16 An email response: they are waiting for Tim Smart’s review of board capability and governance.
22 Aug 16 I email to ask if there is any decision about FPPR.

No reply. They didn’t bother to reply. As above. With bells on.

Katrina Percy ‘stepped down’ at the end of September 2016.

2017

There are three criminal prosecutions against the Trust in 2017. All cover Percy’s period of ‘leadership’. The Health Service Journal awarded her a ‘CEO of the Year Award’ back in the day which features on her LinkedIn profile. This was, according to a HSJ journalist, awarded by an independent (non-HSJ) panel, nothing to do with the HSJ and ‘before the issues were known‘.

We all know the issues now. Many of us recognised them before weighty (bloated, worn out and toxic seeped and steeped) senior NHS (Improvement/England/CQC/Dept of Health figures) eventually stopped slumbering. We all now know.

There is no more pretence. No more shonky little (and big) practices covering up, denying, bullying, bouncing and battering blame onto bereaved families.

The questions that whizzle around our brains/discussion relentlessly (raised by all sorts of people we meet, bump into or who even pull over to talk to us on the street)… Questions any sensible, non-NHS befuddled (at best) person asks and continues to ask remain unanswered. Not least how the hell could any of this happen?

I don’t know if I want to ever know the answer/s to this. I just hope that those senior bods who were, and continue to be implicated, take a long hard look at themselves. That they start to polish their murky and corrupt stained goggles. Set aside the lure of the rewards for not seeing, not listening and denying and breath in some fresh air.

You’ve been arsewipes of fuckwhattery proportions. There’s no doubt about this. There is also time to change.

L1031251-4

*Our experience of sensitive and thoughtful exchanges with journalists continued with Jonathan Bucks. Thank you.

The bleat action continuum

Posted on August 5, 2017 by sarasiobhan

Over two years ago now I was writing about ground elder and the #LBBill. I’ve moved into the front garden recently, leaving the elder battle in kind of easy truce [I failed]. The front garden has tall ‘weeds’ with yellow tops which grow to middling head height every summer, leaving columns of snappable woody stems in the autumn.

Turns out these fuckers are worse than the ground elder. They have incredibly dense interconnected knotted lumps of a main root with shaggy swathes of stringy roots. Each one involves a hefty dig, more digging and almost full body wrestle to remove it from the ground. I can almost hear the earth breathing as they are lobbed into the brown bin.

Today we were due to hear the outcome of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) investigation into how they could possibly have shared personal details to the six nurses under investigation and their counsel.

Given the General Medical Council (GMC)* tribunal into Dr M’s fitness to practice starts on Monday in Manchester for two weeks and Rich and I are on extreme stress settings, I naively hoped that the NMC would be in touch early on in the day to limit the stress. We’ve had way too many 5-5.30pm Friday disclosures over the last four years.

The day dragged on. I punctuated work tasks with patches of root wrestling. Still nothing from the NMC. By 4pm I drifted onto twitter. It was impossible to concentrate. There was some discussion around what time we might expect to hear from the NMC and recognition that the Friday afternoon ‘disclosure dump’ is clearly modus operandi for public sector organisations with no heart or feeling. I resorted to tweeting the CEO about the cruelty of this delay.

The email pinged into my inbox. At the very outer edges of the allocated time.

Tip: Because you say an investigation is going to take x amount of days doesn’t mean the investigation has to take x amount of days. Focusing more attention on a complete balls-up to reduce the time the investigation takes and the accompanying stress for the family is the least you can do in a situation like this. Particularly if

you had an additional 15 days between discovering the data breach and bothering to contact one of the four people affected.
you have previously and publicly spent £250k redacting documents requested by another bereaved family in a breathtaking self protective act.

One of the numerous shite practices we’ve noticed over the past four years is the tendency for senior public sector staff to bleat ‘It was not our intention to do x, y or z’ despite doing it. Or ‘On reflection we should have done…’ when they didn’t.

What this really means is senior staff act with intent (and speed) when it involves their (organisational or own) reputation/skin and don’t when it doesn’t. The briefing on my blog circulated the day after LB died is an exemplar of this bleat action continuum.

The NMC letter outlined how sorting out the return of our personal data (first shared in November 2016) is shambolic. A mix of returned data, alleged destruction of data and outstanding information about copies made.

About as unreassuring as you could get.

And then, in a move not worthy of being written into a cheesy, made for tv movie, it turns out that after discovering the data breach in July 2017, they re- shared my personal details with three of the nurses. Yes, you read that correctly. Re-shared. Nine months after first carelessly tossing them around. But only [bleat] the same information (minus my bank details) to the same people…

There is nothing like heavy handed, dosh drenched redaction when it ain’t your reputation under threat. Nope. Nothing like it.

Fuckers.

*The GMC have been exemplary in the approach to this: clear, detailed information, communication and organisation.

Branch, burial or crematorium…

Posted on April 29, 2017 by sarasiobhan

“Darling, I’m sorry but the undertaker wants to know if we want a burial or the crematorium…”

“I’m just filling in a HSIB Patient Safety Awareness form.”

“A what? What’s HSIB?”

“The Health Safety Investigation Branch… Some government thing.”

“We need to make a decision. Apparently the cemeteries are pretty full around here.”

“Sorry, I’m stuck on this question: Why do you think HSIB should investigate your incident?”

“What incident?”

“Jimmy’s death.”

“Christalmighty. He died for fucks sake.”

HSIB was launched this week. Led by Keith Conradi, an air safety expert and pilot, with over 40 years of experience. The new branch is allegedly independent despite being called a branch, based within NHS Improvement and funded by the Department of Health.

I’m sure Conradi is an ace guy. I’m sure he knows his air safety stuff. Patient deaths and bereaved families? Not so sure. The ‘its’ and ”relatives of incidents’ on the HSIB website suggest not.

The gig is that HSIB will investigate 30 deaths a year using a Human Factors approach. There is a set of criteria for selecting these deaths; outcome impact, systemic risk and learning potential. Your daughter, father, brother, sister, mother has become a learning tool and the bigger the potential learning from their death, the more chance they have of making the cut.

If you understand the various hoops on the website and get through them, you eventually (after two pages with an identical ‘get started’ button) reach a link to the Patient Safety Awareness Form. The potential gold ticket. This kicks off by asking:

When did the problem you want to share with us happen?

I kid you not. The problem... The incident. Relatives of the incident. Human Factors bods take the non-pursuit of blame to a level that doesn’t translate well into health care. Reducing death to ‘a problem’ will probably send most bereaved families who have got this far into further pieces. If they limp through to the final page of the form, they are expected to produce a coherent justification as to why the death of their loved one reaches the criteria for investigation.

I don’t know. There is something different about approaches to safety in the airline industry and safety in the NHS. Dragging Human Factors from the former to the latter (without some reflection, understanding, empathy and commitment to adapt the process to the very different context) clearly necessitates an erasure of the human and focus on nothing but systems. But health care is necessarily messy, interactive and drenched in human. It involves patients who die in a many different ways, at different times. In the airline industry I assume (please tell me if I’m wrong) that a plane crash generates an instant grouping of deceased passengers, and their relatives, who have some shared experience of this catastrophic event or happening.

On twitter tonight I was introduced to the concept of “second harm”. This is:

Blimey. Second harm. This is so important (and makes me want to scrowl given the battering we, and so many other families, have experienced because our beyond loved children, parents, sisters or brothers died in the ‘care’ of the NHS).

The information on the new HSIB site is offensively phrased, not accessible and the process of ‘referring incidents’ is exclusionary; it assumes particular levels of understanding, articulation and engagement. And, as importantly, ignores grief and humanity.

It has, in short, considerable potential generate more second harm. Classy stuff.