The Complaints Nobody Read

Abstract

In the autumn of 2007 a woman named Julie Bailey sat beside her mother in a hospital in Stafford, in the English Midlands. What she saw on the ward over the following weeks, and what she saw happen to other patients around her, made her do something most relatives in that position do not have the strength for. She complained, and then she kept complaining. When the complaints went nowhere inside the hospital, she found other families who had seen the same things, and together they formed a campaign group with a plain name: Cure the NHS. This chapter is about what happened to those complaints, and to the many others that came before and after them, and about why a public institution with every formal channel for hearing them did not hear. It is the book's third case, and the one in which the cost of a failed membrane is counted not in market share or warranty claims but in the care of people who could not leave.