We need to tell the public that hospitals are ‘horrible places’, urges trust CEO

Hospitals are ‘horrible’ and unsafe places, which should be avoided ‘unless you really need to be there’, a longstanding trust chief executive has argued.

East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust boss Nick Hulme also said the NHS had to be honest about the state of its acute services.

Speaking at a public meeting of the East Suffolk and North Essex Integrated Care Board, he described hospitals as “awful” and “horrible”, and said NHS leaders had “got to get that message out” to the public. 

He added: “The food’s rubbish, we don’t let you sleep, we don’t let you know what’s going on” and that although he had stayed in some “fairly dodgy” hotels, none had forced him to share a bathroom with six people.

The trust CEO told the meeting he wanted to emphasise to the public that “the worst place you can possibly be in the health system is a hospital, unless you need to be there”, according to a report in the East Anglian Daily Times.  He added that hospitals were “not safe places”.

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Source: HSJ, 26 January 2023