Ayrshire and Arran NHS – obfuscation, concealment and gibberish

John Burns, chief executive of NHS Ayrshire and Arran, concealed more than 50 ‘critical incident and adverse event’ reports of things going seriously wrong at a hospital or clinic. When a member of staff asked for a copy of one of these reports, concerning an incident in which he had been involved, the management told him that he was not entitled to read the report and advised him to file a freedom of information request. After much delay and obstruction, he managed at last to access the damning catalogue of failures, and the CEO to explain. This, word for word, reported in the Scottish Review, is Mr Burns’s reply:

‘The reports were going out to managers, they were going out to be actioned but what we didn’t have was a proper closure in the system back to evidence that the actions and the learning had been taken from these reports, and that’s not right – we needed to have that.’

This illiterate piece of tosh attempts to justify what Kevin Dunion, Scotland’s information commissioner, described as the most serious breach of FOI laws he had ever dealt with. Assurances given to Mr Dunion and his colleagues proved to be ‘unjustified’. Records of serious incidents were ‘missing’. This indictment of a public body is very close to accusing it of lying.

Mr Burns does not officially take over as chief executive until April 1st, which some may feel to be an appropriate date. However, his predecessor left rather abruptly, with a substantial public pension, and Mr Burns is now in the hot seat. It might be assumed that he would strive for an element of candour, but (if one guesses correctly from the mangled syntax) he appears to uphold the story that there was no deliberate policy of concealment. In his previous post with Dumfries and Galloway, he was earning £120,000 a year. Does Arran and Ayrshire have value for money in this man?