Figures issued by the Home Office have shown that checks conducted last year by National Health Service (NHS) officials on 1,411 individuals revealed information being held by the police service. That information ranges from relatively low-level incidents, such as an official reprimand or perhaps a caution, through to a full-blown criminal conviction or a ban from working with children.
The Mori survey included National Health Service (NHS), independent and voluntary sector posts. In all, the details of 12,715 NHS applicants were cross-referenced with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).
According to a detailed report published in The Health Service Journal, only 56 of the 1,411 individuals were rejected for employment, leaving the remaining 1,355 free to accept job offers. Even though some of the individuals involved have been employed in sensitive roles, it appears they were still accepted for posts despite disclosing past ‘dealings’ with the police.
The official CRB line is that the new checking system is far more comprehensive than the previous method of police checks. Records include spent convictions. On that basis, it’s very much up to employers to make a decision about whether they are relevant to the job in question.
The sorry tale doesn’t end there, though. Research conducted by Radio Five Live involving every NHS Trust across the UK suggests that the number of workers in the Health Service not vetted by the CRB could top 50,000.
At present, the Trusts aren’t required to vet employees who have worked for them since before the CRB was first established. 61% of Trusts have not vetted existing staff. In other words, six out of every ten NHS Trusts have not carried out criminal record checks on those who started work prior to the new rules being enforced.
It’s remarkable that a vetting scheme already in place to help carry out security and safety checks is seemingly being ignored in so many instances. Surely the same standards must apply across the board? It makes no sense to have different rules depending on the point in time at which someone started to work for a Trust.
Lax vetting could give would-be terrorists working in the NHS easy access to deadly viruses and dangerous chemicals. A security management specialist based in one of London’s hospitals (and who wished to remain anonymous) told The Health Service Journal: “Most hospitals dish out staff cards that let the recipient into certain areas, but it’s easy to lend someone your pass. That could give them access to X-ray machines, isotopes, chemicals and disease slides. It could be days before anyone realised a virus was missing.” That is frightening.
Security minister Admiral Sir Alan West (former head of the Royal Navy) has just been tasked with reviewing NHS staff screening methods such that he can determine how workers from overseas are (and should be) vetted. A step in the right direction, but why did we yet again have to wait for a major incident to occur before this problem was exposed and addressed?
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that The Watch List will now include those individuals identified by other countries’ security services as potential terrorists. He has also vowed to press ahead with plans to vet sponsors who sign the applications of foreigners seeking work permits for the UK.
‘Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime’. Maybe Gordon Brown will be the man who manages to turn what have so far been rhetorical hollow promises from the Government into reality. He’d better. In this day and age, our very lives depend on it.