Is patient safety in the NHS fundamentally broken?

New Secretary of State for Health, and Social Care Wes Streeting has described the NHS as being broken (Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), 2024a). This is a controversial and bold statement and can be seen to strike at the heart of NHS patient safety culture development efforts. In an interview for The Guardian (Elgot and Campbell, 2024), he said:

‘I'm extremely anxious about maternity services. And what frightens me is the issues we've seen raised in relation to Nottingham and Kent – I think [they] are a risk factor right across the NHS, and it's one of the big reasons why we are losing midwives faster than we can recruit them in some cases.’

This illustrates that the Health Secretary is acutely aware that there are major NHS patient safety problems that urgently need fixing. He also commented on Martha's Rule, saying that the NHS should go further, and on the Care Quality Commission (CQC), among other matters (Elgot and Campbell, 2024).