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‘Suffering that is hard to comprehend’: key takeaways from UK infected blood report
Scandal was completely avoidable, with government and NHS colluding to cover up risk to patients
May 20, 2024, The Guardian
A day of reckoning has arrived, more than 50 years since the first victims received infected blood. The UK public inquiry has published its final report, which it is hoped will provide a measure of justice to the thousands of people affected by apportioning blame to the government and health service, and paving the way for a formal apology and compensation scheme. Here are the main points covered.
1. The disaster could have been prevented
The main message from the 2,527-page report is that what is thought to be the NHS’s worst treatment disaster “was not an accident” and could “largely, though not entirely, have been avoided”.
Patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable” infection risks between 1970 and 1991, and this resulted from successive governments, the NHS and the medical profession failing to “put patient safety first”, concluded the inquiry’s chair, Brian Langstaff.
Successive governments are primarily to blame for the “catalogue” of “systemic, collective and individual failures” that allowed the infected blood scandal to happen, though “others share some of it”, wrote Langstaff, who has been hearing evidence since 2019.
Ministers’ refusal to own up to failings “served to compound people’s suffering”, resulting in a decades-long battle for the truth, Langstaff wrote. He asked why it took until 2018 for a UK-wide public inquiry to be established.
It was “astonishing” that this could have happened in the UK, causing a “level of suffering which it is difficult to comprehend”, Langstaff said.
