What went wrong at Addenbrooke’s?

The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) decision to condemn Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust as inadequate forced out its physician chief executive and opened up serious questions about the inspection process.

The chief executive, Keith McNeil—a former sniper in the Australian special forces who became a transplant pioneer at Papworth—quit shortly before the commission published its inspection report last month and the regulator Monitor put the trust into special measures.

With a deficit running at around £1.2m (€1.6m; $1.8m) a week, staff shortages, major difficulties getting patients in and out of the hospital, and disruption caused by the implementation of its new electronic health record system, the inspectors must have expected to find serious problems. Yet overall the outcomes at Cambridge—better known by the name of its largest hospital, Addenbrooke’s—are impressive by national and international standards; its mortality rates are low and its safety record is strong.

McNeil believes the inspectors “came in with a preconceived idea of what they wanted to find.”