Record View: No excuse for NHS cover-up.
WE all make mistakes. It is part of the human condition. But when we make them, part of being human is also admitting them.Moira Pullar died because she was given 10 times the amount of insulin she was prescribed.
That is a tragedy and someone should be held accountable for that fatal error.
But it could be forgiven if it was honestly owned up to. Instead, someone decided to compound that tragedy by covering it up.
We expect that sort of behaviour from little children, not the grown-ups in our public services.
How can we trust people with our lives when they cannot be trusted to tell the truth when things go wrong?
Cases of mistakes in the NHS are easy to find and can give a distorted picture of what's happening in our health service.
But one way to contain the public disquiet surrounding such errors is to be open and honest and admit to what has gone wrong.
This case undermines our trust in a way that is far more worrying than one bad tale of someone waiting on a trolley.
We demand perfection from our public services but we understand when they fall short because of circumstance or mistakes.
What can never be understood or forgiven is lying.
The entire idea of a national health service depends on hope - hope that collectively we can provide for one another.
That is fatally undermined if bad faith shows that patients aren't human lives but consumers whose statistics can be fudged and lied about
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| Title Annotation: | Comment |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland) |
| Date: | Dec 9, 2005 |
| Words: | 255 |
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