An
early seventeenth century proverb informs us that, for practical as well as
moral reasons, honesty is the best policy. Oliver Cromwell, when writing to the
High Sheriff of Suffolk, Sir William Spring, in 1643, remarked that ‘a few
honest men are better than numbers’. In 1814, Jane Austen recognised the
difficulties of positions of power when she was writing her novel, Mansfield
Park, remarking that ‘we do not look in great cities for our best morality’.
Yet only with the pursuit of honesty in public life as well as in private, can
one hope to achieve the safe haven spoken of by the Roman Emperor Marcus
Aurelius when he said ‘nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled
retreat than in his own soul’. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us
that ‘honesty’ is being ‘free of deceit; truthful and sincere; simple and
unpretentious; genuine and straightforward’.
Why
is it then, with over two thousand years wherein leaders in a variety of fields
have recognised that being honest is an imperative of life, do we find
ourselves confronted by newspaper headlines informing us that honesty appears
to be the last moral value adhered to within the NHS? In the past few weeks we
have seen a number of these, not least those proclaiming ‘Rotten NHS culture
led to cover-ups’, followed by discussions of ‘institutional secrecy’, ‘NHS
scandals’ and regulators ‘suppressing evidence of failures’. The Secretary of
State for Health, the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, was even moved to make a speech in
which he demanded a ‘new culture of openness, transparency and accountability’,
whilst also recognising that ‘the best motivated people do make mistakes’.
That
latter comment is important, for the pursuit of honesty is not the same, and
should never be the same, as the pursuit of litigation for negligence. In an
honest workplace, with every person sincerely striving for the common good,
negligence should be a rare beast that raises its head. Honesty underpins the
act of doing the right thing at the right time and then being clear about what
it was that was done; even if, with the value of hindsight, matters could have been done in a
better way.
In
the same speech as that mentioned above, Jeremy Hunt went on to state that the
success of a new culture of openness and transparency ‘will depend on the right
incentives and consequences’, citing the need for greater powers for the
regulatory bodies such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC). However,
regulation and regulators are not the answer; they have never been the answer.
Regulators are merely ‘the dust-carts that follow the Lord Mayor's Show of
life’ as the NHS commentator Roy Lilley recently put it. They tell us what went
wrong in the past; they do not give us reassurance that all is well in the
present.
No;
it is not more regulation that we need. What we need is for those working in
the NHS (and politics, and any other facet of public life) to be honest. For only
on the solid bedrock of honesty, do we have the capability of building the
necessary facets of a valued and enduring society.
First published in the Scunthorpe
Telegraph, 4 July 2013
© Copyright Robert M
Jaggs-Fowler 2013
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