Stafford Hospital scandal

The Stafford Hospital scandal concerns poor care and high mortality rates amongst patients at the Stafford Hospital, Stafford, England, in the late 2000s. The hospital was run by the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, and supervised by the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority. It has been renamed County Hospital.

Julie Bailey, whose mother died in her home, in 2007, started a campaign called Cure the NHS to demand changes in the hospital. She was supported by the Staffordshire Newsletter, but the Public and Patient Involvement Forum and the Governors of the Trust were defensive.

The scandal came to national attention because of an investigation by the Healthcare Commission in 2008 into the operation of Stafford Hospital in Stafford, England. The commission was first alerted by the "apparently high mortality rates in patients admitted as emergencies". When the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which is responsible for running the hospital, failed to provide what the commission considered an adequate explanation, a full-scale investigation was carried out between March and October 2008. Released in March 2009, the commission's report severely criticised the Foundation Trust's management and detailed the appalling conditions and inadequacies at the hospital. Many press reports suggested that because of the substandard care between 400 and 1200 more patients died between 2005 and 2008 than would be expected for the type of hospital, based on figures from a mortality model, but the final Healthcare Commission report concluded it would be misleading to link the inadequate care to a specific number or range of numbers of deaths. An independent 2008 study into hospital standardised mortality ratios found that the Dr Foster method is prone to methodological bias, and that it was not credible to claim that variation in mortality ratios reflects differences in quality of care. In 2015, The Guardian amended an article from 2013:

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