Openness: a virtue whose time has come

Despite the upbeat rhetoric of the government, Britain's National Health Service seems to be staggering to the end of the century. The public has been horrified in the past week to discover that many children's hospitals have collected hearts and other organs from children who have died without getting clear consent from parents (p 1518). The government has ordered an inquiry. The Daily Telegraph has started yet another series arguing that elderly people are being failed by the NHS, even to the point of being left to starve. The threnody of the Bristol …