Frontline health professionals, not external regulators, are the key to driving up quality in the NHS, according to speakers at a King’s Fund meeting on Tuesday.

To date, the focus has been too much on patients and the forthcoming report into the crisis at Mid Staffs Hospital, which will be known as the Francis report, needs to enable NHS staff to deliver on quality, they said.

Anna Dixon, director of policy at the King’s Fund, told the meeting, which was called Quality first: are we expecting too much from the regulator? that there had been too much emphasis placed on the regulator and too great a tendency to blame the …