Nicholson “bitterly regrets” not meeting patient groups at Mid Staffs hospitals in 2009

The outgoing chief executive of NHS England, David Nicholson, has admitted that he “bitterly regrets” his failure to meet with patient groups during a visit to scandal hit Mid Staffordshire hospital trust in 2009, describing the decision as the “biggest mistake” of his eight year tenure in charge of the NHS.

Nicholson, who steps down at the end of this month, said he took the decision at the time in order to avoid a “media circus” like the one that had arisen when the then health secretary Andy Burnham had visited the trust after it had been the subject of a damning report from the Healthcare Commission in 2009.1

But in a candid on-stage interview with the journalist David Brindle at the NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo 2014 in Manchester this week, Nicholson acknowledged he made the “wrong call” not to seek out patient groups when visiting the trust.

“The biggest and most obvious mistake that I made was when the Healthcare Commission reported on Mid Staffordshire hospital [trust] and I went to the hospital, and I didn’t seek out the patients’ representatives and the people who were in Cure The NHS,” he said.

“I didn’t do it because I made the wrong call. At the time Andy Burnham had been out [to Stafford Hospital] and it had been turned into a media circus, and I didn’t want to be involved in a media circus. And I was wrong; I was absolutely wrong.

“There is no shortcut to understanding and talking to patients and people,” he added. “I didn’t do it, and I got myself into a tangle of talking to people through the media. That was a mistake that I made that I bitterly, bitterly regret.”

Nicholson has faced fierce and sustained criticism from patient groups and the media following the Mid Staffordshire scandal, including numerous calls to resign following Robert Francis’s public inquiry into the events at the trust.2

But he said he opted to stay in the role because he felt that things could turn “horribly negative for the NHS overall” after the scandal and he wanted to use the lessons from Francis to bring about positive change across the health service. “I thought we could use it as a catalyst,” he said.