Sky Views: Transparency helps the NHS

Paul Kelso, Health Correspondent

Loath as I am to direct anyone away from Paste BN for even a moment, Hospital, the BBC2 documentary filmed at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, is worth a look.

The product of six-weeks' unfettered access to one of the busiest trusts in the country, it's a compelling watch, even in the crowded field of hospital documentaries.

We follow elderly patients marooned as they wait for social care, children debilitated by anxiety as they await confirmation of life-altering surgery, and frazzled staff trying to cope amid a sea of trolleys.

The trust, and specifically the communications director and former chief executive who agreed to let the cameras in, deserve great credit.

Not everything on screen will have been comfortable, but it speaks of an openness that is sadly not universal among their peers.

Gaining access to hospitals this winter has been fraught and sometimes frustrating.

Paste BN is one of numerous outlets that have spent the winter trying to get cameras onto the frontline to tell the story.

Transparency is the NHS's best weapon. It won't help with infections, but sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

For the first time this year NHS England tried to manage that demand centrally, offering access to hand-picked trusts if broadcasters ended the standard practice of directly approaching hospitals.

Part of the motivation was practical. Hospitals receive hundreds of media requests and the only way of making an A&E department more fraught in winter is to add a camera crew.

But under great pressure from the Department of Health, I suspect NHS England wanted to try and manage access to paint the most positive picture possible.

Jeremy Hunt told trusts in October that he did not want the sight of patients on trolleys in corridors to become normalised. (Spoiler alert: it didn't work).

So requests for the kind of extended access enjoyed by the Hospital team were rejected and we were directed to only the best-performing hospitals.

Such tussling is routine, and you may well sympathise with anyone who has to deal with uppity, intrusive hacks.

But the desire to massage the message did lead to at least one bewildering attempt to obstruct our journalism.

At one trust I was forbidden from making even small-talk with staff not "approved and prepared for interview".

Ludicrously, at one stage the head of communications physically stood between me and a senior consultant as I attempted to thank them for allowing us to film a meeting. I'm still not sure which of us, all allegedly grown-ups, was most embarrassed.

Then, after I anonymously quoted a staff member who had described winter as "hell" in a live two-way, I was told "co-operation could be withdrawn". I think this was code for slinging us out.

It should be said that clinical staff were universally open and numerous trusts, including Bart's, Dorset, and West Midlands Ambulance Service, were accommodating to a fault.

I think they know that transparency is the NHS's best weapon. It won't help with infections, but sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

Nobody who watches Hospital will think anything but the best of the staff, and all will be dismayed at a system so clearly letting them down.

Who knows, Theresa May might even be among them.

There has to be some explanation for her Damascene conversion to the merits of a long-term funding solution for the NHS.

Just nine months ago it was entirely absent from the Conservative election manifesto, and all winter she insisted the NHS had all the funding it needed.

Practically and politically that has become an impossible line to hold.

With A&E performance at its lowest-ever level and Labour holding a decisive lead on the issue, Mr Hunt has been lobbying publicly for a 10-year deal.

Now that Mrs May agrees, we await their solution for a problem they helped create.

As members of every Cabinet since 2010, they both signed off on the austerity plan that produced the tightest financial squeeze in NHS history.

The consequences are clear to anyone who watches Hospital.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Adam Boulton - What I learned about Brexit outside London