Complaint
A listener complained that the speaker had cast unwarranted aspersions on NHS workers and misrepresented the Ockenden report into maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust which had been published the previous day.聽 The ECU considered the complaint primarily in the light of the 大象传媒鈥檚 editorial standards of accuracy.
Outcome
The listener maintained that the speaker had misunderstood the central finding of the Ockenden Report, which concerned managers and their failure to learn from a series of mistakes (rather than health care staff).聽 The ECU noted, however, that the speaker ranged more broadly than the report which had provided the occasion of her talk, eliciting common themes linking a number of scandals in the NHS in recent years, of which Shrewsbury and Telford was only the most recent to emerge.聽 These included a lack of accountability and a hierarchical structure which inhibited junior employees from drawing managements鈥 attention to serious failings in the standard of care, and she expressed a concern that justified praise of the good work the NHS does risked blinding us to its faults: 鈥淚t鈥檚 been said before that the NHS is the nearest thing we have to a national religion. But perhaps we haven鈥檛 realised how that relationship distorts with it, and how it might also be damaging relationships within it鈥.聽 In the ECU鈥檚 view, this was a legitimate conclusion for the speaker to draw from the instances she cited and not (as the listener saw it) an attempt to blame all NHS staff for the shortcomings of management, of suggest that they lacked Christian values.
Not upheld