Dear Peter,

It’s good of you to acknowledge my honesty and caring.  I return the compliment. But I question your judgement.

I remember your article accusing me of sitting on the fence over the issue of how Stafford hospital was being run. As you say, I objected to your charge and asked to see you face to face. When we met, I said that my objection is that I was not sitting on the fence – I was getting in there, trying to make the trust give my constituents proper standards of care and treatment.

The way I chose to try to achieve this objective was to work with the hospital to get them to improve services. I believed the accounts constituents gave me of poor care and took them up with the management. I’m angry and disappointed when I see that the Commission’s year-long investigation lays bare that the explanations and promises given to me and my constituents were worthless.

Julie Bailey chose a different way. She stood outside the trust and called for heads to roll. The report vindicates her choice and I congratulate her on being right.

You say I should examine my conscience. If you meant the compliment you paid me, you will know that I have done so, constantly since I read the report. I look back on the work I did about “standard mortality ratios” when the Dr. Foster guide was published in early 2007. I re-examine the work I did on infection control at the hospital and in Parliament later that year and I look back on the work I did last year on “peer monitoring” which was what Julie’s group asked me to do. After that, the Healthcare Commission’s investigation kicked in, but I didn’t stop working with the hospital in the meantime – you can say that the report demonstrates that more doctors, more nurses and more matrons alone do not solve the hospital’s malaise, but I kept on at them to make sure they recruited more staff.

I’m currently working for the best way out of the situation we are in with our local hospital. I don’t want it to remain under a cloud, I want systems in place to tackle any shortcomings as they arise and for there to be constant monitoring. I want them to get basic nursing right every time and a proper system of training and appraisal. Staff have got to be involved in decision-making and feel able to speak out if something is not right. The whole trust should be “open and learning”, as the report says. I appreciate that Julie Bailey shares your view that I should have taken on the trust, not worked with it, but I am willing to co-operate with Julie – chastened as I am by my experience.

I raised with the Prime Minister on Wednesday the need for patients’ relatives to have independent help to assess medical records to establish whether poor care caused or contributed to any patient’s death. I went to the hospital on Friday to tell the trust that the medical records must be kept safe and only someone from outside this region should be allowed to carry out the assessment.

I agree with you that a public inquiry is needed. Whilst the Commission’s report tells us a great deal about what went wrong at Stafford hospital, the “why” remains unclear. Why is it that the Healthcare Commission itself awarded the trust the top 3 star rating for services at a time when this report tells us the services were hopeless? Why did the trust get Foundation Trust status at a time when the report slates the trust’s management, leadership and governance? And how can we in future make better use of patient and public representative bodies like PALS and LINks?

I wrote to Alan Johnson on Wednesday, after he made his Statement in the House of Commons (yes, before I read your comments) to put the case for a public inquiry. I will follow this up in the Commons next Tuesday when it is the Health Ministers’ Question Time.

Quite apart from such an inquiry, however, our hospital trust has got to be reconstituted from top to bottom. We have got to ensure that while the focus is on our hospital trust we bring in the whole NHS – primary care trust, strategic health authority and the Department of Health – to make the hospital so good that we are always confident we will get the best possible care. It’s hard to know who can be trusted to do this work after reading of such shocking failures in the past, but given that the interim Chairman and the interim Chief Executive are both from out of the area and both will be leaving us in a few months, it’s hard to see that they have any conflict of interest. But as Julie got the call right on the last management, it would obviously be helpful if she would agree to join in the process of choosing the next.

Yours sincerely,

David Kidney MP.