Your Humble Servant: day surgery inquiry

To: Don Wise, chief executive From: Paul Servant, assistant chief executive

Re: Excuses, excuses

Dear Don The Cut and Carry Day Surgery Centre inquiry team will be visiting this week.

We established the inquiry following the collapse - literal, not figurative - of the new centre to push the event out of the headlines until after the general election. I gather the impending legal action has galvanised the SHA into stirring the inquiry into action.

The roof of the centre caved in three weeks after opening because we halved the number of supports and downgraded the quality of the steel used in their manufacture.

We then transferred the saving from capital to revenue to eliminate that year’s deficit.

Happily, no one suffered permanent harm after we paid the orthopaedic surgeons a premium to re-attach three fingers to the unfortunate patient - it was a weekend, after all!

We then bulldozed the debris into the ground and constructed a consultants’ free car park over it, removing any trace of the day centre project and making some of our doctors very happy.

There is no reason for the inquiry to upset the post-incident harmony that exists providing we play our cards right.

I have been looking back at successful excuses for wriggling out of earlier NHS disasters:

. I inherited the previous chief executive’s project True, but not useable as he now runs the SHA and leads the inquiry . It was the previous organisation’s project and we have since merged Also true, but you ran the previous trust . We are utterly baffled and may never know as all the tests have been inconclusive Not true, but it worked for a couple of train crashes . It was an unpredictable act of God The Hurricane Katrina defence is somewhat discredited now . We all had a role to play, but responsibility cannot be apportioned to any one person or organisation as they were acting with the patients’ best interests in mind, and we will learn from this event so that it can never happen again Always a winner!