Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust under fire: Andrew Lansley says trust must improve (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Question is : can they (trust management) be trusted to do so ?

They've had plenty of opportunity to do things right but have systematically failed to do so.

I think our democratically elected representatives on the Local Scrutiny Committee now have a DUTY to give Tony Halsall a real grilling next Monday at their special emergency meeting. If not then they too are letting the local community down - locals in South Lakeland haven't forgotten the lack of teeth that committee demonstrated when the acute services were removed from WGH and another "pulling the wool over their eyes" is simply not going to wash with most people.

To anyone on that committee reading this - please do your public duty and take the management to task, make sure that you set deadlines for improvement/change with proper scrutiny that those have taken place and also to seek to get the government to impose penalty on the management if they fail to change/improve within those deadlines (including if necessary the removal of certain individuals from their posts)- without those how can the committee be ever termed a SCRUTINY committee and how can any faith be restored in the management of our local health service.

The recent reports from the local RCN again demonstrate that management don't want to listen or act on staff concerns about patient care/safety - that has got to change. Again the committee has a duty to make sure it does indeed change.

We have become accustomed, since the days of the minimally lamented Alan Clark, of Tory ministers not only being economical with the actualite, but being proud of it. Lansley has furnished us with another example.
He declares that he has told the CQC to publish much more data, when he cannot fail to be aware that the CQC is devoted to the absolute opposite and is presently engaged on a systematic cover-up of the grave errors it made over UHMB, leading to the Foundation authorisation and rocket propelled crash into the mire.
After the South Cumbria Coroner forced CQC to re-examine the FGH maternity services it which had only recently approved, and Monitor intervened at UHMB, CQC quickly removed its previous shoddy approving reports on UHMB from its website. That was in mid-October. They are still missing now- go to CQC website and search for FGH and RLI- you will find links to the reports, but they aren't there- the links just go round and round! Terry Thomas had just the catchphrase for the exceedingly dodgy CQC- they're an 'Absolute Shower'. And Lansley knows it.