Latest Briefing Column

Geoff Martin Column

I spent the best part of two days in Maidstone on Health Emergency business following the C Diff scandal. It was our outfit who blew the whistle on the fact that Chief Exec Rose Gibb had been bundled out of the door a couple of days before the Health Commission report hit the fan, with a big, fat six figure pay off. We forced Alan Johnson to intervene.

Maidstone was a scandal waiting to happen and the same poisonous cocktail of pressures could spark a similar disaster in any region of the country. This is the anatomy of a cross-infection scandal:

· Over two decades of privatisation of cleaning and hospital support services. Corners cut and pennies-pinched in the drive for profit. Cleaning, catering, portering and security seen as a soft touch for cuts. Jobs casualised and under-valued and staffing levels hacked back to the bare bones.

· Health care providers instructed to balance the books at any costs. NHS senior management over-populated by the same brand of self-seeking incompetents at the heart of the New Labour project. Budgets hacked back regardless on instruction of former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to save her job.

· PFI. Senior managers in the NHS obsessed and blinded by grandiose PFI projects and the racketeering Independent Sector Treatment Centres. These political fads drawing key management resources away from the sharp end of the service. The Director of Nursing at Maidstone had been seconded over to work on PFI while his staff were crying out for support.

· Management consultants ripping off millions from the NHS while nursing vacancies are frozen. Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells were spending £3.5 million on management consultants while C Diff was ripping through their wards and 300 posts were axed and vacancies frozen. That money would have put more than a hundred extra nurses and support staff on the wards and probably would have been enough to contain the hospital acquired infections.

· The target culture. I’ve met too many managers who are nothing but bullshitters, lying through their teeth to hit phoney targets while the staff at the delivery end are run ragged.

· Bed occupancy at levels that make cleaning and hygiene virtually impossible. Patients are ghosted around hospitals in the early hours of the morning to meet admission targets with barely enough time to change the sheets let alone clean the beds and the surrounding area. Browns conference spin on deep cleaning is nothing more than a sick joke when there’s no spare capacity to decant patients into.

· Not a shred of local democracy and accountability. Individual Trusts are run as little more than local dictatorships by Boards of Directors answerable only to themselves. Since the abolition of CHC’s by New Labour in 2003 the last chance of holding executives to account was stripped away. The scrutiny committees at local authority level are miles out of their depth and, for the most part, useless.

· Staff morale has collapsed through the floor. Leadership is non-existent. The NHS has always depended on highly motivated staff but now bullying and the blame culture is rife. Senior management is remote and politicised as little more than a mouthpiece for central government. I rub up against these people, and their armies of spin doctors, all the time and they are a disgrace. They hate me and Health Emergency and frankly I am glad of that.

So pile all that together and you end up with the infectious time bomb of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells and 90 dead bodies. There are hundreds more piled up in mortuaries up and down the country – many families never even see C Diff or MRSA on the death certificate because junior doctors are bullied by the target culture of inserting some other bogus cause.

This is the real world ten years into New Labour and yet the bed closures and service reductions are still rolling on from Swansea down to Sussex, through the North West and up into Scotland. We’ve demanded a moratorium on any further bed reductions, staffing cuts or service closures – join us in that campaign.


· I was hoping to be the first commentator to blow open the increasing resemblance between Brown and Richard Nixon but some sod nipped in before me in the Guardian letters page.

Check it out, the same heavy-jowelled, sweaty, evasiveness. Replace “There will be no cover up at the White House” with “The opinion polls had nothing to do with my decision not to hold an election.” Try it. It’s a CIA cloning experiment, I swear.

* And finally – check out Manu Chow’s new album Radiolina. A fantastic return to form from the champion of oppressed people’s around the globe. It’s now nearly five years since Joe died and we need the Manu Chow’s and Steve Earle’s more than we ever did.