The disaster in Stafford is about so much more than a hospital

In January 2008, Daily Mail columnist Sue Reid reported as follows (my emphases):

‘The number of babies under one month old being taken into care for adoption is now running at almost four a day (a 300 per cent increase over a decade)…critics of the Government’s policy are convinced that the vast majority are taken by force.
Time and again, the mothers say they are innocent of any wrongdoing….Of course, there are people who are not fit to be parents….(but) over the five years since I began investigating the scandal of forced adoptions, I have found a deeply secretive system which is too often biased against basically decent families.
I have been told of routine dishonesty by social workers and questionable evidence given by doctors which has wrongly condemned mothers…millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been given to councils to encourage them to meet high Government targets on child adoptions.’

For much of the last fortnight, The Slog has devoted time and space to putting greater and more flesh on Sue Reid’s serious allegations.

‘For a mother,’ Reid concluded, ‘there can be no greater horror than having a baby snatched away by the State at birth’. The Mail’s campaigner cannot have known how prescient this observation would prove to be….and how quickly the implied danger would come horribly to life.

Almost exactly a month later on February 12th, 28 year-old Willow Simpson was found by staff at St George’s Hospital, Stafford, hanging from the window in her room. An internal investigation concluded she ‘could have been saved had staff checked on her overnight’. But that was a hopelessly superficial attempt to pin the death on a front-line worker – somebody outrageously underpaid who was doubtless working an overlong shift.

Because the reality is that Miss Simpson had been told only a few days earlier that her son was being forcibly adopted, and she was unlikely to see him again.

The distraught mother had a meeting with social workers. And at that meeting on February 7, Willow was told she would have to apply for access to see him; that this would probably be denied..and there was nothing she could do to stop the proceedings.

Women with kids in Stafford are far too often told by arrogant social workers that there is ‘nothing they can do’.

As we’ve seen from numerous Slog articles about Stafford this week, the local, vocal protesters dismiss Stafford hospital internal inquiries as whitewashing cover-ups. In the light of what has happened since 2008, this writer finds it almost impossible to disagree.

But what this penultimate piece on the topic shows is more broadly damning: and when it comes to socially challenged places like Stafford (Plymouth and Liverpool are no different, they just haven’t reached crisis point yet) there is no such thing as ‘the hospital problem’ or ‘the single mothers problem’ or ‘the mental health problem’.

The problem is that a disintegrating social culture in Stafford has met a corrupt, cynical, underfunded and muddled culture of treatment and justice.

Take for example the summing up by Coroner Haigh – a man we have come across quite a bit this week. He said:

“..it is clear Miss Simpson killed herself, but she was more upset than she appeared after the meeting with social workers, and it may have been a cry for help…”

Dear oh dear oh dear. How did Mr Haigh know how upset Willow ‘seemed’ after she saw the social workers? And do people making a cry for help hang themselves after locking the door of her room?

This ‘conclusion’ is not only daft, it is disgracefully dismissive of a life avoidably lost.

But nobody lost their jobs as a result of this case. And none of the social workers involved were either investigated or censured. It’s hard to find out who they even were. What we do know is that yet another Management-Speak drone called Amanda Godfrey added her two-pennorth of drivel to Haigh’s summation. This lady – a manager in the NHS Trust since shown to be the most derelict in the history of public medicine – had this to say:

“Any untoward incident is thoroughly investigated in line with our procedures, and the Trust endeavours to learn from and improve services as a result of such events.
As an organisation, we also welcome the opportunity to receive feedback from users of our services, their carers and families and take their views very seriously.”

Words fail me.