Hospitals ‘must be more curious’ to catch rogue surgeons

Rogue surgeons could be harming patients across England because hospital bosses are unwilling to challenge them, the head of the NHS has warned after the Great Ormond Street scandal.

Sir Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, said he was worried hospital trust boards were not “curious enough” about the standards of care in their hospital and too willing to trust unreliable performance data.

He was responding to revelations last week that almost 100 children were harmed by Yaser Jabbar, a paediatric surgeon, at the world-famous Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The scandal has prompted NHS England to write to medical Royal Colleges warning of “emerging evidence” of more widespread harm from surgical negligence.

Asked directly about the GOSH report at a parliamentary event on Thursday, Mackey said: “Nearly everything that’s gone wrong in my career, from a clinical point of view, lots of people have known about it. But the organisation responsible hasn’t been connected with them [surgeons], curious enough, listening enough, or been acting on it.

“It does come back to the board doing its job, individuals being curious, being willing to challenge, being willing to go to places that they don’t want to go.”

He added: “One of the things we want to really try and do in our work is restore the necessity for boards to have good oversight but also deploy curiosity carefully. Because often behind these things you see a very serious lack of curiosity and acceptance at face value of data, which I’ve learnt in my career you can’t ever do. The data’s poorer now than it’s ever been.”

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Source: The Times, 31 January 2026