Margaret Watt: Patients deserve more than bare statistics

Published on Tuesday 22 June 2010 12:24

FIGURES are fine in hindsight, but what people want to know is what lies behind these statistics.

Are we talking about people who died of infections? Are we talking about people who died because of mistakes?

And are we talking about people who died with malnutrition in our hospitals?

I think that health boards have to be a bit more transparent than the figures they are currently producing.

We, as an organisation working on behalf of patients, are looking for the hard facts – what was the exact reason for those figures?

By doing that it will give the patients much more confidence in the NHS to say that at least health officials are being upfront. You can flannel people with facts and figures, but that is not good. We want the meat of the situation and to know what these figures relate to.

The figures as they currently stand are no good for the average person to work out how their hospital is doing.

At the end of the day, we are the stakeholders in this institution, the NHS. They are the employees and we are the employers and, as employers, we are entitled to get all the facts.

We have to work in partnership with patients and the only way to do that is to be transparent about the facts with them. People are worried about issues such as hospital-acquired infections and we need to get to the bottom of what is causing this problem to continue.

We are in a very serious situation. We know of many cases where patients have died because of mistakes being made.

The NHS needs to be honest with patients and the public about what is causing these unexpected deaths and then work together to reduce them.

&#149 Margaret Watt is chair of Scotland Patients Association