Cover-Up Culture in the NHS seemingly everywhere?

[SpicyMoth]

It's a couple days old, but I've just come across this LBC video with a phone in from a retired NHS consultant. Many others then emailed in to corroborate that they experienced the same.
C

To briefly summarise, he's talking in relation to Lucy Letby and how there is definitely a "cover-up culture" within the NHS that goes up to the highest levels that even he himself has experienced when trying to speak out about things.
To the extent where even genuine mistakes will be covered up for reasons such as "Well the patient only had six months left to live anyway".

When watching it, my boyfriend piped up to say that when he spent time in the NHS as a cleaner it was the same.
Even something as simple a piece of equipment looked like it needed replacing or was about to break or let's say there could be a potential hazard such as mould? They didn't want to know, and they'd do nothing about it when he said something.
(This was mid-COVID btw, so even scarier to me to be honest. Especially when you consider everyone was supposed to be following specific rules re; cleanliness and anything he brought up was ignored!)

On top of that, we also had the Triggernometry interview with Hannah Barnes yesterday evening re; GIDS, and it very much went along the same lines.
People speaking out and being ignored. Concerns being raised. There being talk, and conversations and agreement that certain things may not be working but nothing ever happening.

Even with Letby, I saw in reporting that people were suspicious for ages before higher up's finally did something or police got involved, I'm unsure which off the top of my head right now.

Before this recent horrendousness I perhaps ignorantly assumed/hoped that the Tavistock stuff was just down to a vocal few being captured by ideology in that specific department, but now I see it seems to be more of an NHS-wide issue, and in regards to anything and everything, not just gender.

How in the flying fuck did we even get here?

Alot of it is having HR departments that are busy sorting out issues to try and avoid employees taking employers to court for discrimination.

If they used the money that they are spending on huge HR departments [and lets not get into the money wasted on Stonewalling themselves]...and used that to pay off likely discrimination cases, then the managers could focus on sacking people for misconduct when they fuck up.

Jed Mercurio wrote Bodies over 17 years ago which highlighted just this. To the best of my knowledge it's only ever been shown on terrestrial TV that once though you can now get it on streaming.

The current NHS is just one public institution that is now run by spin doctors, shills, and overpaid self-centred incompetent unregulated "managers" who mostly couldn't run a bath and worse, don't care. They mainly just bounce around from one very lucrative post to another, like Tony Chambers.

Although this is the worst case ever to come to light (so far) thanks to the tenacity of the consultants and the support of the local police force, I don't think anyone in an ordinary job in the NHS will be the slightest bit surprised at just how callous the senior managers have been in the Letby case. Don't think it's unusual either that they kept ignoring things and procrastinating when people raised concerns as Freedom to Speak Up is currently a bad joke at many Trusts. The Board members and directors in many geographical footprints are often EXTREMELY close to each other and just recruit their mates to vacancies, sometimes without even bothering to advertise the job or have an actual job description. And the number of extramarital affairs is eye watering though those with actual jobs to do might wonder where on earth these people find the time.

At a Trust near us (adjacent geography to Countess of Chester, different jurisdiction) the CEO is much more interested in finding attractive selfie backgrounds than actually managing the organisation and listening to people's concerns, let alone doing anything about them. It could easily have been this Trust up there in the dock, though for different reasons

So much more will be coming out now about just how bad certain trusts are, some far worse than others. And NHS England, which is supposed to be an overarching authority of some kind, is currently shedding 40% of its staff. They'll mostly therefore be bickering about the size of their payouts and when they can come back to a different overpaid role rather than giving much of a monkey's paw about the actual issues.

I believe in the principles of the NHS but am currently alternately disgusted and despairing.

I think knowing that the NHS has these issues is somehow really depressing because the NHS has this whole aura about its place in UK history - and realistically because many of us need it, sometimes quite desparately, for our health needs.

As an outsider I have had the experience of being told I couldn't complain about the CEO of a specialist hospital because he was a friend of Tony Blair! Not saying there is any connection but the hospital did seem to go through a major upgrade.

And when trying to make a complaint to a council about shocking (lack of) social care provision for a vulnerable person reliant on carers, that the person concerned would really prefer that I didn't make the complaint as they were just working out their notice and moving on to a new job. They honestly thought that it was okay to say that to a relative of someone who's care package had actually been given to a company whose background was providing staff for restaurant kitchens. If it wasn't so serious you would have to laugh.