Pressure to cut costs had calamitous effect

Gary Culliton examines why things were able to get so bad at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where hospital staff said they would not refer their own families. There was no effective clinical or professional voice on the board at Mid Staffordshire, where it is feared hundreds of hospital patients died needlessly, a meeting in Maynooth heard recently. “There were so many regulators on the pitch, that nobody knew who was kicking the ball and in which direction,” said Peter Watkin Jones of Eversheds, the solicitor to the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry, chaired by Robert Francis…