HOW good a hospital is the Royal Free? It’s lousy – according to Whitehall inspectors who’ve given it zero marks.
But just as statistics can lie, so can hospital league tables and ratings.
For instance, if you’re a patient waiting to go in for an operation at the Free, should you be worried?
Not according to Dr Gill Morgan who helps to run the watchdog teams that inspect Britain’s hospitals.
She said yesterday (Wednesday) that in “clinical terms” hospital ratings “do not mean anything”. Basically, they were only an indication of managerial efficiency, said Ms Morgan of the Healthcare Commission.
In fact, in an interview with the BBC she got so carried away with the government’s plans for the NHS, that she assured the public that hospital league tables were going to be ended this year anyway, all part of a momentous future for hospitals.
This made me wonder why Whitehall mandarins can’t keep their ideas to themselves and just let the medical staff and managers get on with running their hospitals.
In the idyllic past all hospitals were funded by the government, and one hospital was about as good as another. Then came Mrs Thatcher, the injection of the ‘market’ into the NHS, and the introduction of Trusts. Not content with this, New Labour interfered once again and introduced semi-private Foundation Trusts.
It is true that the Free has been hounded by bad publicity recently – some of it originating in this column. Last week I wrote about the death of an elderly ex-teacher from the bug MRSA caught at the Royal Free. Infection from the super-bug at the Free isn’t entirely under control.
But by and large the hospital does a pretty good job.
The staff worked round the clock in successfully treating casualties from the bombings on July 7.
At the back of my mind I can’t help wondering whether the Free is being run too honestly. It’s a pretty open secret in the medical profession that some hospitals – one in West London – have gone in for dirty tricks in the days leading up to their inspection by Health Commission officials.
Dodgy tactics have included:
• Bringing in extra staff – often locums – in order to keep waiting lists down, especially in the accident and emergency department.
• Cutting back on patients waiting for ‘elective surgery’ in order to speed up more serious surgical cases.
• Telling a patient to go home and come back in the morning if it is not possible to call a specialist – that counts as two separate visits less than the target waiting time.
• Fiddling the books so that separate budgets are created to make it appear the hospital has more money than it has.
That’s what other hospitals have done. Perhaps the Free has fallen foul of the watchdogs because it has been run by the rule-book. Even so, I have no compunction in handing the Free one black mark – that is for naming a ward after its ex-chief executive, Martin Else.
Ironically, Mr Else has sailed off into the sunset, landing a higher-paid job, somewhere around £150,000 a year, in the Department of Health, while leaving behind a frustrated successor, Andrew Day, trying to cope with a demoralised staff. That’s NHS politics for you!

Your (empty) carriage awaits

IN the face of the bomb threats London’s mayor Ken Livingstone assures the world that the capital can take it. Carry on as normal, says Tony Blair.
For the past few days I have been doing something Tony Blair never does – travelling by bus and Tube.
You can say that from now on a bus or a Tube compartment will never look the same after the atrocities on July 7.
On the bus I look around. If someone is carrying a shoulder bag, or, worst of all, a rucksack, I begin to fidget. Am I the only one who behave likes that? And have you begun to notice how many people actually carry rucksacks?
On the Tube travelling to south London on Monday, my compartment was completely empty, as was the next one, and this around noon when, normally, they would have been fairly crowded.
Coming back to Camden Town the compartment was slightly fuller. I asked a man sitting next to me whether he felt afraid.
“Not at all, statistically the risks aren’t all that great,” he assured me.
Statistically? “But never mind about the mathematics of it all, how do you feel?”, I asked. Then he explained that he was a scientist.
Somehow feelings hadn’t come into his reckoning.
It wasn’t the same for me. Emotions play a bigger part with me.
But I’m not the only one, it seems. Because yesterday (Wednesday) a spokesman for London Underground admitted that fewer people were now travelling by Tube.
The slight statistical risk of being caught up in a horror journey doesn’t seem to be an attractive proposition for most travellers.

Mukul – hot on Labour’s heels?

WHILE ambitious Labourites have been tearing themselves apart in Somers Town for selection as a candidate in next year’s local elections, I came across a man who may prove to be the wild card in the pack.
Once an admirer of the Labour party, and of the former leader John Smith who tragically died in 1994, Nueuzzaman Hira told me yesterday (Wednesday) that he is going to stand for the new George Galloway-inspired Respect party in Somers Town.
You may say, so what. In that redoubt of Labour, he won’t stand a chance.
But Mr Hira, known as Mukul (pictured) in the area, aged 39, a smart, articulate Bangladeshi, who grew up in Somers Town and Bloomsbury, is well known in the area, and can count on scores of votes without lifting a political finger.
He has run the only halal grocery shop in Chalton Street for years with his elderly father, and its customer base alone makes him a serious contender for the seat.
He is in fact far more local than the Labour candidates, and it’s unlikely the other parties will find anyone who will be in his league.
He’s a modern, moderate, assimilated Muslim – he attends the local mosque once a week but in many ways he’s a bit of a Cockney.
You can see how popular he is by the number of customers who come into his shop, smile and chat to him.
In the 2002 elections the Labour candidates attracted around 900 votes each in Somers Town while fringe parties only pulled in 200 or so. I will be surprised if Mr Hira doesn’t end up on the heels of Labour.

Protesters beware – it’s Nathalie

THAT free-thinking ex-Labour Camden councillor Nathalie Lieven – a lawyer by trade and champion of the failed bid by London Underground for a glitzy development of Camden Town Tube station – is appearing for the poor and oppressed again.
Representing Home Secretary Charles Clarke in the High Court on Tuesday she said a ramshackle set of posters and banners tied to railings facing Parliament could be a hiding place for a bomb. She tried to persuade the judges that anti-war protester Brian Haw, aged 56, who has set up camp for the past four years in Parliament Square, should be removed under the new law that bans demos in the area. Haw’s demonstration would be a security risk, argued Ms Lieven.
Ms Lieven (pictured) was known to handle all development proposals benignly while sitting as a member of the council’s planning committee in the 1990s.