In the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal, the profession should re-focus on its core values and combine that with regular review of team and individual performance, so writes John Duncan

In 1998 Richard Smith, the then Editor of the British Medical Journal, in a leader about the Bristol heart scandal, quoted W B Yeats when he wrote that the NHS had “all changed, changed utterly”. It is depressing that 15 years later we are now talking about the Francis Report, the public enquiry into the Mid Staffordshire Trust. The report seems to show that Smith’s assertion was incorrect. Between 2005 and 2008 “conditions of appalling care were able to flourish” in a major hospital in the UK and that having happened, the NHS and worse, parts of the profession, were in a state of denial for years.