About Us

1. We focus on awareness of the benefits of making a Statutory Duty of Candour in Healthcare UK Law.
2. The NHS Complaints Process is not fit for purpose. We discuss this on several pages of our site.
3. We publish links articles and self help documentation on this site for people to use. See our LCNHS page. There is also a wealth of information on Citizens Advice (NHS). The information also includes links to the Department of Health (DH) website which contains the NHS Constitution (2010). Revealingly, it is an aim for NHS employees to be "to be open with patients, their families, carers or representatives, including if anything goes wrong;". A good aim. Naturally the constitution should not in our view be quite so coy. This should be a duty not an aim. Why so? Only the competent and honest will take this aim seriously. The incompetent and mendacious will not. Which leaves the competent and honest medical practitioner at a serious disadvantage when dealing with the consequences of incompetence and mendacity. Would any other profession stand for this? We think not. So why should the medical profession? Especially when incompetence and mendacity often results in catastrophic outcomes.   
4. We tell the stories of some of our members in detail to let readers form a view of the NHS Complaints Process.
5. We discuss regulatory organisations, their merits and failings and publish the views of other organisations.
6. We host tributes to our relatives who have needlessly died and host members stories.
7. We have an associated forum for members where support and advice (where we can) is given and received.

We are non-political with affiliations to no particular party. 

Duty of Candour

A Statutory Duty of Candour may need a short explanation. It is a legally binding obligation for medical personnel to tell the truth about the care they give to patients and to refrain from falsifying medical notes. An obligation which extends to all involved. We have heard many reasons aired by interested parties to support the notion that this legislation is not necessary. These reasons are all incorrect and do not withstand the lightest scrutiny. They are then used to support errors in logic leading to the notion that it is a duty that should not be set in law. It should be set in law.

Briefly, it is a powerful tool which will enable removal of incompetent medics from a position where they routinely harm people. Currently good managers find removal of incompetents difficult. An incompetent medic will lie and falsify medical notes. And get colleagues to cover their errors. Some NHS managers encourage this behaviour and some impose sanctions to force medical personnel to lie. A statutory obligation sweeps the foundation for this practice aside. It should have been set in law before the NHS was founded. A 1947 oversight that has inevitably led to increasingly bad practice. An 'oversight' argued for by people who were well aware of the high risk nature of medicine in 1947. Most of the population are unaware that this anachronism still exists. Until it is generally too late. 

Why a Statutory duty, not a Voluntary duty?

We need to go a bit further than examining complaints managers and their retinue of staff who do nothing but deflect problems instead of investigate, legal services managers who know nothing about a Trust's legal obligations to customers (patients) and highly placed individual who do not, and never have had the right attitude. What do I mean by that? Please let me illustrate using the words of an NHS consultant who has had many years of experience:

 The details of an intervention should not be discussed with patients or relatives; the need to know of such things may be entirely voyeuristic in some cases. My colleagues and I are paid to know and do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological pressures resulting from our actions. There are good reasons why the public should not be exposed to such knowledge. They do not deserve to be confronted with the realities that we face every day to keep them well. 

This view is probably not news to many within the NHS. It may well be news to many. It goes well beyond the term ‘Paternalistic’. This fatally flawed logic makes a mockery of openness honesty and integrity. It can be used to provide cover for any abomination. A psychologist (psychiatrist?) might go as far as describing it as classic psychopathic thinking, the thought processes of someone who should be kept well away from vulnerable or critically ill people. And yet the NHS cannot easily break his contract even though he displays all that is wrong about the current NHS culture. So what chance is there of a voluntary duty of candour surviving in such a culture?

People, colleagues, managers and so on, would feel far less obliged to cover for others if it is explicitly stated in statute that they should not do so. In short nobody would then be able to apply pressure to force others to break the law on their own or others behalf. It is a matter of protecting the competent from the incompetent, not yet another statute that nobody implements. It is a foundation on which attitudes change. Illegal is illegal, a medical note falsification would be illegal which is no bad thing. It is also most importantly, a matter of life and death for many people who find themselves dependant through ill health.

The NHS Complaint Procedures

The NHS Complaint Procedures and Ombudsman are the current routes people are advised to follow when they have suffered an adverse event in NHS care and seek accountability, justice or simply the truth.

Many complaining about medical negligence and adverse incidents have been shocked to find that the system is not impartial or thorough and rightly feel that justice has not been served and that truth has been evaded. Complainants tell of medical records being lost or altered, physicians lying or hiding the true facts, delaying tactics, questions not being answered, evidence not being investigated, and of being labeled as vexatious, wrong or mentally impaired to divert proper investigation. The NHS complaints system makes things worse when people are at their most vulnerable and need assistance most.

This website is a response by NHS complainants to all parties who make a living out of the NHS complaints system, from managers to medical note fiddlers who refuse to understand the destructively negative effect their work, if it can be called that, has on competent members of the caring professions and the public. Both are badly served by these professional liars. The taxpayer is effectively being defrauded by a large cohort of people who add no value to anything at all for their salaries. A job creation scheme whose output is entirely worthless and in most cases actively damaging.

Despite clearly knowing what they are doing they continue to fog issues, abuse complaint makers and lie. They commit perjury without turning a hair. Anyone who feels that the NHS Complaint Procedures did not deliver justice is most welcome to submit a resume of their experience. Experiences will be published on this website if so desired. Please feel free to browse. The site was launched on 01 May 2010. The verified experiences members have had published here include a criminal act of deliberately killing a patient along with many instances of falsification of medical notes, transparent lying and evasion and failures at all levels.

NHS Trusts and Clinical Negligence Advocates, through to the Regulatory bodies, the General Medical Council (GMC) and Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) routinely fail.

In fact we have never heard of an individual experience where the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council have acted decisively solely on a patient or surviving relatives complaint. The NMC and GMC only appear to act if a Trust brings a complaint about an employee to their attention. They do nothing at all if an individual complains. They say that they protect patients. It is not clear why they pretend to act for the public. Because they do not. These regulators only act for the profession or NHS employers. Anyone who has had an individual complaint attended to properly by the GMC or NMC is welcome to present their resume for publication on this site. We have been unable to find one after searching diligently. This invitation is also open to the GMC and NMC. We strive to present facts not fancy. On 1st Feb 2012 the NMC responded to this admittedly very bluntly put challenge. I have mounted it on our NMC page here.

If you simply want a general browse before becoming immersed in the detail of some harrowing cases we have on site I can recommend starting with our page on Vernon Coleman. He shares a few myth dispellers including the evergreen 'we are underfunded and understaffed' notion. We have featured him on our website among other writers because of his vast experience and propensity to tell home truths which many would sooner not let the public know. Here is a good video of how to stay healthy Stay Healthy