Freedom to Speak Up

We welcomed February’s report on whistleblowers by Sir Robert Francis. Patient safety and the improvement of safety standards relies on people being able to raise concerns and there are few people better placed to do this in the NHS than the doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, including student nurses and locum staff, who are working day in day out with patients and their families.

If the Freedom to Speak Up recommendations are implemented fully, this could mean a new era of openness, transparency and fairness in the NHS. But it goes without saying that this isn’t the end of the story. A large investment of financial resources will be needed to assist training and to provide support and robust enforcement. It is a massive commitment across the political parties to change the culture of NHS institutions and how they are managed. We will be interested to see how this is managed after the upcoming election.

Bullying in the NHS cannot be allowed to continue. Quite apart from the unacceptable impact on victims, bullying is a safety issue if it deters people from speaking up.

What do the Freedom to Speak Up recommendations mean for you?

It means the first steps to providing an open and honest culture of reporting in the NHS.

The ability to raise concerns is a vital way to make sure services and procedures are delivered to the highest possible standard and should be a normal day to day occurrence for any well led NHS organisation. The fact that it isn’t and hasn’t been, has resulted in tragedies such as those in Mid Staffordshire and the recent Furness General Hospital scandal, when patient safety has been severely compromised.

For all of us who rely on the NHS, we want to know that concerns are raised and acted upon and that patient safety standards are constantly improving.

What Next?

The Report sets out 20 principles to be implemented to help change the culture of speaking up in the NHS. These include:-

• action at every level of the NHS to make raising concerns part of every member of staff’s normal working life
• a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian in every NHS trust a National Independent Officer who can support local Guardians
• a new support scheme to help NHS staff who found themselves out of a job as a result of raising concerns get back into work.

But we don’t just want the freedom to speak up, we want people to be actively encouraged to speak up and to be supported when they do. The sooner speaking up is recognised as being in the public interest, the better. The lessons of Mid Staffordshire have shown us that patient safety relies on it.