There is clearly a wide-ranging cultural problem within some healthcare trusts where staff seemingly are unwilling/afraid to speak out on management failings (whether administrative or frontline medical). This is especially worrying where patient safety is/may be compromised and, even worse, the NHS’s seeming unwillingness/inability to deliver on its promises to “learn” and “change”, solemnly delivered by the relevant Chief Executive to the media with monotonous regularity every time things have gone badly wrong.
Contrast healthcare with the aviation industry where the focus really is on “learning” what went wrong and why, and then implementing genuine “change” through regular industry-wide incident reporting and updated management/maintenance/production/training requirements in order to ensure, as far as possible, that the same issues don’t keep getting repeated and causing further avoidable pain and suffering and loss of life.
Why the difference? In aviation, generally (there are exceptions of course - like Boeing), the culture and regulation promotes and operates within an open and transparent and widely used process of reporting (including anonymously) without fear of retribution. The NHS should do the same starting with the job description of every CEO being required to include, at the top, their individual and personal responsibility and accountability for implementing adequate processes for staff to be able to report, without fear of retribution, all issues that potentially undermine or threaten staff and/or patients.