Mid Staffordshire Hospital report: The woman who exposed an NHS scandal

A woman who set up the campaign group 'Cure The NHS' has been hailed as the reason why the Mid-Staffordshire health care scandal came to light.

Julie Bailey set up the group after her mother, Bella Bailey, 86, died at Staffordshire General Hospital in 2007.

She lobbied for an open investigation into how terrible standards of care were allowed to continue.

Fellow victim Gillian Peacham has praised her for her work, insisting that without the campaign people still would not know what happened at the hospital.

She said: "I really truly believe that if it hadn't been for Cure The NHS this would all have been brushed under the carpet.

"This needed to be told - it was needed for people to see what was going on at the hospital, and that's what Cure The NHS has done.

"Sometimes people have been quite nasty and abusive and it's not been an easy ride but I think the outcome should satisfy the members of Cure the NHS."

Cure the NHS was joined by the Patients Association when it released a petition calling for a public inquiry into what went wrong at the hospital.

Complaints about care in the NHS were now coming in from all over the country, Miss Bailey said.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast this morning, she said: "From all over the country I get emails asking for help, help for the complaints procedure, people that are actually suffering on the wards today, asking for help, from the particular hospitals that have been identified last night, but also other hospitals.

"I can take these complaints down to particular wards within hospitals, they are so frequent, but there's just nobody to help these people, and this is the huge problem that's going on throughout the whole of the country.

"We know the NHS does some wonderful things but we also know it's doing some awful things to people, and they're our most vulnerable."

Miss Bailey said there needed to be changes at the top of the NHS and denied that she was seeking scapegoats.

"This isn't scapegoating, these people have failed, these people knew what was going on at that hospital, these people had a responsibility, Peter Carter had a responsibility for his workforce, and Sir David Nicholson had a responsibility for patients."

Read more: Mid Staffs hospital scandal: The key questions about the inquiry


Miss Bailey's mother collapsed on Ward 11 of the hospital after being left in a chair with

no oxygen supply because there were no nurses available to reconnect the

canister.

The pensioner, who had a hiatus hernia and suffered from breathing difficulties, had left the ward to undergo an endoscopy and was placed in a chair on her return by a hospital porter, Miss Bailey told the inquiry.

She said her niece, who had been visiting, was told repeatedly that a nurse would reconnect the oxygen supply, but after 45 minutes no nurse had arrived and her mother collapsed.

Miss Bailey said: "The healthcare assistant kept saying, 'the nurse will be with you in a minute, the nurse will be with you in a minute' but she never came.

"So mum collapsed and my niece telephoned me."

She added: "I believe that if my niece hadn't gone in to see my mum at that particular time when she collapsed then she would have died there that day. I am convinced of it.

"After that I decided that mum would never be in that hospital alone and that is what we did."


Read more: Mid Staffordshire Hospital Report: Timeline on how the scandal unfolded


Describing the ward, Miss Bailey said: "It was absolute chaos. There were people screaming out, shouting 'nurse, nurse'. It was just bedlam.

"There were just relatives waiting all the way down the corridor which I later learned was people, relatives, coming in for visitor hours and then waiting to talk to staff.

"It was just like clutter all the way down and people shouting out.

"It was just, it appeared to be, utter chaos on the ward."