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[/audioplayer]Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing that week’s ‘Never Events’. It catalogues the mistakes that have been made in NHS hospitals that should never have happened: people having the wrong leg amputated, swabs being left inside patients after surgery and the like. This grim list is a rebuke to the glib, Danny Boyle-style rhetoric which dominates all political debate about the NHS and treats any attempt to examine the failings of British health care as heresy.
One can’t imagine Andy Burnham, the last Labour health secretary and the shadow secretary of state, approving of Hunt’s decision to display this information so prominently. Earlier this month he accused the Health Secretary of being on a ‘mission to run down the health service’ so that it can be privatised.
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