After Mid-Staffs, the NHS needs whistleblowers – and whistleblowers need protection from the public

It is impossible, I would have thought, to have heard Debbie Hazledine’s account on the Today programme of her late mother’s mistreatment at Mid Staffs Hospital and not to have thought ill of the hospital in question. An institution in which such callousness thrived for so long must have few friends left, you might imagine. And yet the strangest thing about the Mid Staffs scandal is the defensive feeling it has inspired. The ‘Save Mid Staffs’ campaign has been vocal at points, while Julie Bailey, the Mid Staffs whistleblower, appears to have been persecuted. In front of this backdrop, a debate about what should happen to wards in failing hospitals has morphed into a full-on slanging match about the future of the NHS. I doubt that Robert Francis QC, when he was writing his report on Mid Staffs, would have envisaged this fevered situation.