Clause 3
NHS Redress Bill [Lords]
11:00 am
John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Health; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
I will speak briefly in favour of amendment No. 15. It is, to some extent, pushing the envelope because it extends the giving of redress to include a report on similar cases and changes being put forward by the hospital to stop similar errors occurring. I can recall many cases to which the amendment would apply. My reason for supporting it goes back to a particular case in which an elderly gentlemen who was very ill—he subsequently died, although that had nothing to do with this episode—was asked to walk when he arrived at hospital because there were not enough wheelchairs. He had a very painful experience, when he should have been whisked into hospital in a wheelchair.
I was contacted by the family. It was perfectly apparent that they did not want money or any redress for their father, who was by then deceased. Nor did they want heads on the block. They just wanted to know that no such thing would happen again. When I investigated the matter, I found out anecdotally that there were enough wheelchairs in the hospital, but they were in the wrong places. In some cases, wheelchairs had been taken incorrectly by members of the public. There was something to be learned from the episode. The redress that the family wanted was that the message had gone to the hospital that this sort of thing should not happen again.
It is not my job to point out weaknesses in the amendment, but one weakness is that in some cases there will be no lessons to be learned. There is human error even in the best-designed schemes, procedures and protocols. People will ignore protocols or fail to carry out a scheme effectively. The amendment has force and it should be in the Bill.