If you’ve any sense then you probably would not eat food out of a filthy, dishevelled kebab shop where the food preparation equipment is either missing, broken and in any event which the staff have not been trained to use properly. You would more than likely give this particular eating establishment a very wide berth indeed, unless of course you were actively looking to contract food poisoning.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone would choose to eat in such a one star kebab shop like this, but expectant and birthing mothers attending Hull Royal Infirmary’s maternity unit, which has achieved the lowest one star rating from the Care Quality Commission, do not have the luxury of such a choice. These women are forced by the disgraceful socialist failure that is the NHS to have their babies in ‘unsafe’ facilities where the management is ‘chaotic’, where neonatal resuscitation equipment is missing and where staff were not properly trained.

Sky News said:

A maternity unit has been given the lowest possible rating after the regulator described it as a “chaotic environment which was not fit for purpose”.

Hull Royal Infirmary, which forms part of the Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, was visited on 15 March, 24 April and 25 April as part of the Care Quality Commission’s national maternity inspection programme.

Following the visit, the watchdog downgraded the hospital’s maternity rating from good to inadequate.

Inspectors said systems and risks in the antenatal day unit and triage department “were not well managed” leading to long delays in pregnant women being seen and a “chaotic environment which was not fit for purpose”.

The article went on to explain how only 51% of staff were properly trained in assessing foetal growth with other staff found to be unaware how to evacuate a birthing pool in the event of an emergency. There was not even any system for assessing whether staff were competent for the role that they were fulfilling.

The failures in this maternity unit are not esoteric ones that are impossible for management to deal with nor failures that have been thrust upon them by some unfortunate circumstances, they are pretty basic organisational failures that any competent entity should be able to avoid. Things like making sure that your staff are properly qualified, trained and managed, ensuring that vital equipment is not only available and properly serviced but that the staff know how to use it and being able to evacuate staff and customers from the facility if there was some sort of emergency. These are entry level competence failures. The sort of management errors that have brought about the disgraceful state of Hull Royal Infirmary’s maternity services would not and could not be tolerated in the private sector. The mythological filthy kebab shop that was mentioned earlier would probably be closed down even if they had half the faults that the inspectorate found in this maternity unit, or they would garner such a terrible customer reputation that they would quickly go out of business.

The problem is that the NHS doesn’t go out of business even when it treats its customers like dirt or worse kills them with good old NHS incompetence. It just keeps getting taxpayer money and continues to deliver services that are at best OK and at its worst, lethal.

The depressing thing about this story, apart that it from the regularity of reports from regulators castigating the NHS, is that people have a choice to avoid a filthy festering badly run kebab shop, but expectant mothers rarely have the choice to not attend badly run local NHS maternity units like this and all too many others.