'The contaminated blood scandal will reveal a government unable to learn from its mistakes' 🔵 IsabelHardman for ipaperviews
This sort of attitude is still evident today in the way that parts of the health service respond to mistakes. Instead of admitting that something has gone wrong, the instinct is to try to reason it away, to suggest that the patients and their families who are complaining are being unreasonable, and that there is nothing to see here.
The second group were ministers who read the letters drafted for them by officials and didn’t push back against the “nothing to see here” line. Andy Burnham, who was a Labour health minister between 2006 and 2007, and then health secretary at the end of his party’s spell in government, admitted to the public inquiry in July of this year that he hadn’t resisted the official line given to him in the department.
There were schemes that provided various types of financial assistance to some victims, such as the Macfarlane Trust, the Caxton Fund and the Skipton Fund. But all have been dogged by complaints of impossibly strict criteria and haphazard organisation, leading survivors to feel forced into a “form of modern-day begging”.
They already felt that society was against them, feeling that the stigma of both illnesses resulting from the infected blood meant that they shouldn’t tell anyone about their diagnosis.
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