Campaigner welcomes more nurses

Stafford Hospital said it accepted the findings

A health campaigner has welcomed news that registered nurses are being drafted in on three wards at a hospital which was branded appalling.

The Healthcare Commission looked into care being provided by Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2008 and concluded patients died needlessly.

A follow-up government review said care was now safe, but problems still existed over staffing and equipment.

Cure the NHS founder Julie Bailey said the hospital needed experienced staff.

Further improvements

Mrs Bailey, whose elderly mother died at the hospital in 2007, welcomed recruitment of nurses to wards 10, 11 and 12 to ensure staffing is maintained at the correct levels.

The hospital said this was in addition to 101 additional nurses and 38 doctors it has appointed in the last 15 months.

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust showed a "lamentable failure of clinical leadership", reports revealed.

Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the trust.

The reports by Professor Sir George Alberti, National Clinical Director for Emergency Care, and Dr David Colin-Thome, National Clinical Director for Primary Care, found "significant" improvements had been made at Stafford Hospital.

Action plan

But they revealed there was an urgent need to make further improvements to some services.

Stafford Hospital said it accepted the findings, adding it was "totally committed" to driving through improvements.

It added the recommendations made in the reports will form part of an action plan by the hospital which will be overseen by Monitor, the independent regulator of NHS foundation trusts.

The Labour MP for Stafford, David Kidney, said he still wanted a public inquiry.

He said: "I accept that the two reports that have come out and of course the Healthcare Commission report itself do give us all that we need to know about what went wrong and what needs to be put right.

"There are lessons to be learnt yet that we don't have enough information on and that's where the public inquiry argument goes."