Some UK NHS services infested with maggots. National inspection has never taken place, will start next year-BBC

.
12/11/13, "'Maggot-infested' GP surgeries exposed by inspectors," BBC, By Nick Triggle

"Inspectors have exposed a catalogue of failings at some GP practices in England, with drugs stored incorrectly and rooms so dirty they had maggots. 

The review by the Care Quality Commission of over 900 practices said there were too many "basic failings".

The checks were targeted mainly at those practices deemed to be high risk ahead of next year's rollout of the first national GP inspection regime.

Overall, concerns were expressed about a third of practices.

In nine cases the failings were so serious that they could "potentially affect thousands of people", the CQC said.

These practices have been ordered to improve, although in one case new GP management has been brought in. Among the problems identified across the board were concerns about the way medicines were managed.

The CQC said it had found examples of emergency drugs being out of date and vaccines not kept in properly regulated fridges - something which could damage the effectiveness of the jab and cause outbreaks of disease.

The regulator said some practices were "visibly dirty", citing cases involving maggots being found in treatment rooms....

Prof Steve Field, the CQC's new chief inspector of GPs, said it would herald the end of an era where poor care was tolerated in general practice.

He said the problems highlighted in the checks had sometimes been known about locally for years.

"We are hearing about problems that people are very worried abut but no-one has tackled in the past."...

 




12/10/13, UK Prime Minister in charge of maggots laughs it up at Mandela funeral. Seen with Denmark Prime Minister and Mr. Obama in selfie. AFP

=============================

NHS watchdog CQC has sometimes hidden negative findings: 

6/19/13, "NHS watchdog cover-up: Jeremy Hunt says 'whole truth' must come out," UK Guardian, Haroon Siddique and agencies

"Consultants from Grant Thornton were commissioned to look into the CQC's activities in relation to University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS foundation trust, which faces more than 30 compensation claims over deaths of, or injuries to, mothers and babies up to 2010.

David Prior, who took over as CQC chair in January, was blunt in his assessment of the findings, describing the report as damning and the watchdog's management at the time as totally dysfunctional.

"I am desperately sorry that this has happened," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "We were not set up then, we are not set up now to investigate hospitals.

"Our job is to investigate hospitals and we were not doing it … The fact is we have been in the position for a long time now of giving assurances to the public that we didn't back up by expert inspection.

"I've known for the past three months we were not fit for purpose when it came to hospital inspections."

Prior said the CQC's former chairman, chief executive and deputy chairman had all left without payoffs, and insisted there had been fundamental changes to the way the organisation operates.

Police investigated the deaths of at least eight mothers and babies at Furness general hospital's maternity unit following a 2011 inquest into the death of Joshua Titcombe, who died nine days after his birth in October 2008.

Last week police announced that they had narrowed their investigation to focus only on Joshua's death. The inquest found he died of natural causes, but that midwives had repeatedly missed opportunities to spot and treat a serious infection.

Joshua's father, James, told the Today programme that the report "lays bare a multitude of extremely serious failures, quite hard to believe". He said the names of individuals in the report should not have been redacted. "There is a question about whether that reflects the way the NHS should be going in terms of openness and transparency," he said.

The Commons health select committee chairman, Stephen Dorrell, said the report made "extremely depressing reading" but that the regulator was now on the right track after a clearout of the senior management.

"In some ways the most shocking revelation in the report is that the hospital was under investigation for its maternity services," he told Today. "It had itself instructed a specialist to come in to review those services, but the hospital did not tell the regulator that that review was going on at the time that the regulator was considering its own review into those services."

The Grant Thornton report describes a CQC official as saying that a senior manager ordered him to destroy his review in March last year because it would expose the regulator to public criticism.

Officials who discussed how to handle the findings of the review included one senior manager who stated: "Are you kidding me? This can never be in a public domain nor subject to FoI [a freedom of information request]. Read my lips."

The Grant Thornton consultants were informed by the official who wrote the internal CQC report that he had been told his work must be deleted because it was damaging to the watchdog.

The official said he felt he was being put in a very difficult position and asked to do something that he felt was clearly wrong, according to the Daily Telegraph, which saw copies of the report.

The Grant Thornton report says the same manager "said that he felt very uncomfortable about the apparent weight that was being given in the meeting to the potential media impact and reputation damage his report findings might cause CQC. His view was that the focus instead should have been on patient safety and the protection of service users.""


.