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Health and Social Care Bill

I, too, support the amendments. I think back to my time in this area when most people who complained were not seeking personal redress; they wanted to see the system improved. Yes, it would be nice to get a proper apology, but they were really looking for some undertaking or some feeling that the lessons had been learnt from something that had gone wrong in their particular case. When you return to an issue after a number of years, it is always interesting to see whether things have developed. I was talking to a business contact whom I had not seen for a while. He said, ““I have had this terrible problem. Have you heard about my teeth?””. It turned out that he had been given the wrong medication and goodness only knows what in hospital. What was now driving him was not that this appalling mistake had happened and that he had been incapacitated for a period, but the quality of the response that he had had. It was, like all those apologies that I remember from when I was involved in community health councils, classically of the nature, ““We are so sorry that you have found it necessary to complain””. That was it; there was no indication of what was going to be done about the particular complaint. When he pressed for a further response, it was that the person involved was no longer with the trust. That might indicate that action has been taken, but it might indicate that the person was an agency worker who was no longer providing agency services in that trust. He was looking for some statement that said that a procedure had been implemented that would prevent that error in prescribing from arising again. Whether or not that was a sensible thing to do, he would have liked that issue to be addressed. What concerns me, and the reason why I support the amendments, is that it is necessary to build in a requirement to learn lessons and to implement them where recommendations have been made following some major shortcoming. This group of amendments is about that. I come back to the point, which has already been made, that if this is not monitored or seen as part of the remit of the Care Quality Commission, whose responsibility is it and whose responsibility will it be to ensure that these matters are picked up and dealt with? My concern is that it will not happen in the absence of that responsibility. If the assumption is that it will be dealt with by someone else, no doubt by the Department of Health or whomever else it might be, why is that not a relevant factor for the Care Quality Commission in looking at the way in which these issues are dealt with by the bodies that it regulates? That is an essential part of assessing whether the management is good and learns from the things that go wrong.