Cameron in hospital pledge
Tory leader David Cameron was today telling the people of Stafford that the "shocking and distressing" failures at the town's hospital must never be allowed to happen again in any part of the National Health Service.
Mr Cameron was visiting the town – where he stood as a parliamentary candidate in 1997 – late this afternoon to meet "Cure the NHS" campaigners following the hospital scandal.
He was due to repeat his message that he has proclaimed since becoming Tory leader – that the NHS must come first if and when he becomes prime minister.
Mr Cameron will tell campaigners that his top priority will be to turn the NHS into a world class service, but that the Stafford episode has shown that that goal is still a long way off.
He will echo the "shock and distress" caused by the "unacceptable standards" at Stafford, but he will also stress the importance of understanding what went wrong "and make sure it never happens again".
"We cannot let the headlines of last month turn into a shrug of the shoulders today," Mr Cameron will tell campaigners.
Speaking ahead of his visit, Mr Cameron backed calls for an independent inquiry into the fiasco over the Healthcare Commission's report, which said more than 400 people could have died needlessly in Stafford as a result of "appalling" standards at the hospital.
He also disputed Government claims that the crisis was only down to bad management at the hospital, instead saying the problems were part of a wider malaise within the NHS.
He said: "We need to understand why this happened and see what we need to do to make sure it never happens again. Those two things are what I want to speak about today."
Mr Cameron said it was "clear" that, alongside management failure, there were some failures found in Stafford which "blight the whole system, including Labour's "culture of top-down targets and tick-box adherence".
