Who’s to blame for the NHS’s blame culture? | Letters
Jeremy Hunt’s article (Here’s the direct effect of our NHS blame culture: babies die.Tragedy after tragedy, it can’t go on, 9 October) will be welcome to many, especially those healthcare professionals who have had to endure the intimidating mistrust and adversarial working culture he describes.What is missing from his account is the seminal role of government’s NHS reforms in creating these problems.In particular, the creation, then proliferation, of commercialised and competing autarkic NHS trusts and outside providers over many years.This has generated a growing culture of corporate defensiveness and reputation anxiety.
Within such conditions, practitioners then adapt to behave much like employees in large commercial organisations – they must show compliance, “loyalty”, conformity and seamless performance, albeit speciously,This tendency has increased with every reform over the last 40 years; each has carried forward a neoliberal agenda – both Labour and Conservative governments have devised policies and managements to assure this,The currently vaunted 10-year plan will merely entrench the problems Jeremy Hunt has otherwise so adroitly observed and understood,Dr David ZigmondExecutive committee, Doctors for the NHS Jeremy Hunt rightly points to the reluctance of healthcare workers to admit when errors have been made, and praises the example of a midwife meeting the father of a baby who died, where she expressed remorse and wished she had acted differently,This honesty led to forgiveness and improved confidence that lessons had been learned.
It strikes me that, in general, politicians are similarly reluctant to admit when they get it wrong.Jeremy Hunt’s imposition in 2015 of a new contract on junior doctors (now called resident doctors) was on the false premise that if they could be forced to work more at weekends this would reduce delayed treatments and discharges.He failed to recognise that this simplistic solution would also require ancillary services – investigations, physiotherapy, social work – to be fully funded and operational seven days a week.The resulting doctors’ strike and subsequent imposition of the contract caused huge resentment.Perhaps it is a case of “politician, heal thyself”?Dr Richard SloanRetired palliative medicine consultant, Dorchester, Dorset Jeremy Hunt’s comments are well meaning but not original, and he had adequate opportunity to change the system.
The most significant call to end the blame culture was by Prof Donald Berwick 25 years ago in his seminal publication To Err Is Human,The Department of Health then published An Organisation With a Memory, which spelled out constructive error management, but in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy of 2019 (after Hunt had been health secretary for six years), it was stated that we need to do more to change the culture,Let’s hope the 10-year plan will help to deliver that change through making it easier for patients and public to speak up,Dr Eric WattsFormer chair, Doctors for the NHS While I agree with Jeremy Hunt’s view on promoting a no-blame culture, implementing that is easier said than done,It is not just litigation that acts as an impediment to learning.
Other factors such as complaints processes, coroners’ inquests (which have become increasingly adversarial) and even the threat of referral to professional bodies all act as a deterrent to a culture of openness and self-reflection.Dr Ian FreemanConsultant paediatrician, Manchester Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
French woman in mother of all trademark battles with DC Comics over parenting app Wondermum
A French woman is involved in the mother of all battles with DC Comics for naming her family advice app Wondermum.Lise Sobéron received a letter from the superhero comic book company’s French lawyers on 1 April this year demanding she stop using the name because of its alleged similarity to Wonder Woman.“When I got the letter, I rang my close friends and said: ‘Very funny, guys,’ thinking it was an April fool,” she said. “Then I contacted the lawyers’ office and realised it was no joke. They told me DC Comics objected to the name Wondermum
Louder than Bombs: Joachim Trier’s thorniest film might be his best
Long before Joachim Trier made the Oscar-winning The Worst Person in the World and this year’s festival megahit Sentimental Value, there was 2015’s Louder than Bombs: a far stranger, slipperier film worth watching for Isabelle Huppert’s spectral turn alone. She plays a character also called Isabelle, a renowned war photographer whose secrets haunt her family three years after her sudden death.Her teenage son Conrad (Devin Druid) still daydreams in class about the car crash that claimed her life, imagining her final, panicked moments. His brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) know (and conceal) the truth: that her fateful, split-second swerve was an act of suicide.The film’s cacophony of grief and anxious romance erupt within upstate New York, 6,000km away from the Nordic, millennial anomie of Joachim’s informal Oslo trilogy
Creative Australia awards Khaled Sabsabi $100,000 grant months after dumping from Venice Biennale
Creative Australia has awarded a $100,000 grant to artist Khaled Sabsabi, months after he was controversially dumped and then reinstated by the federal arts body as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale.The grant – one of 16 made under Creative Australia’s Visual Arts, Craft and Design Framework – will fund the creation of a new body of work for a solo exhibition opening in March 2027 at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art, which will also include Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale work.In August, Sabsabi was also awarded a grant by Create NSW for a major new work in western Sydney.The two commissions represent a silver lining in a tumultuous year for Sabsabi, a Lebanese-Australian artist from western Sydney. In February, he and curator Michael Dagostino were announced as Australia’s representatives for the prestigious Venice Biennale; less than a week later they were sacked, after criticism by the Australian and the then shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler, over Sabsabi’s use of imagery in previous artworks of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
‘The vocals were on another level’: how Counting Crows made Mr Jones
Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.I would get up every morning and listen to Pickin’ Up the Pieces by Poco, which is like the Beatles doing country music. I also had this Benny Goodman album that I was listening to a lot – my dad had picked it up as a free giveaway at a Texaco station when I was a kid
‘A palette unlike anything in the west’: Ben Okri, Yinka Shonibare and more on how Nigerian art revived Britain’s cultural landscape
To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stageSome primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context
Perfume Genius: ‘I really like body hair! I like a bush. I didn’t even notice Jimmy Fallon censored mine’
The singer on looking like Amelia Earhart, the time he set his mother’s house on fire and his beef with the Octopus Teacher guyEveryone was talking about your pubic hair after it was censored on The Tonight Show. Should we all be showing more or less bush?More! I really like body hair. I like a bush. I like the whole deal. I’m sure if I didn’t have a bush, they wouldn’t have censored it
Head of IMF says risks in private credit market keep her awake at night
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Mohammed Ben Sulayem set to remain FIA president after Mayer denied by arcane rule
Women’s Cricket World Cup: Australia storm to 10-wicket win over Bangladesh