There have been decades of scandals in the NHS, from Mid Staffordshire to Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, to East Kent and Nottingham.

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They’ve all highlighted that the NHS is really poor at listening to patients, learning from mistakes, and identifying what might be going wrong.

It is extraordinary that in that context, buried in the Government's Health Bill, are changes that would dismantle much of the patient safety architecture built in the wake of such scandals.

Healthwatch, the independent local bodies that exist to listen to patients and flag when care is going wrong, will be abolished - all 150 of them, along with their 4,000 volunteers. The Care Quality Commission will lose its legal right to demand the information it needs from the NHS to do its job. And the Health Service Safety Investigations Body, which currently guarantees anonymity to NHS staff who blow the whistle on unsafe care, will be folded into the CQC -........

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