The NHS was founded on humanity, but good intentions and written values do not reliably survive organisational pressure. Humanity in healthcare needs to become a developed, practised and sustained capability — not simply an aspiration.

This paper sets out the case for humanity-first healthcare — supporting existing programmes.

Humanity, the capacity to act for the good of others, is central to excellence in healthcare. And humanity is a performance multiplier and the foundation that endures.

The NHS is one of the great stories of humanity. On most days, in most places, it still is for the vast majority. My own recent personal experience of the NHS bears this out.

But we all know this is not everyone's experience, and far from it.

Inquiry after inquiry tells a painful picture of a system under incredible pressure, including what can only be described politely as 'own goals'. When it goes really wrong, the outcomes for staff and families are heartbreakingly tragic.

We know from other sectors that catastrophic failures are rarely one-offs. They provide important insights, even if painful to see, that can help illuminate wider issues. The purpose always should be to learn and build better.

This is what this review is about.

A lot has been achieved in the 78 years since the NHS was established. And there is an opportunity to create something even greater, to inspire a nation and beyond — to become an even greater story of humanity.

Putting humanity into the fabric of the NHS — into its identity

So humanity has to become a developed, practised and sustained capability — not an aspiration.

Recent reports highlight deep issues, issues that reveal a culture and a system that can be the very opposite of its founding vision: caring for people.

To care is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human.

This has to come from within. You cannot regulate people to care. We all give from what we have received.

This is why this paper argues that someone needs to care for the carers, if we are to expect them to care for us at our time of need.

This paper looks into healthcare in the UK, specifically the National Health Service (the NHS). The NHS is one of the largest employers on the planet — some 1.5 million staff in England alone — and it covers a UK population of around 69 million people.

This paper looks at four questions:

1. What is the current status of UK healthcare (the NHS specifically)?
2. Why do major failings keep happening?
3. What is it costing?
4. What is needed?

About the author, Glen Ford

The author, Glen Ford, has spent the past 22 years in volunteer and service leadership in Rwanda, working alongside survivors and perpetrators. Prior, he spent 20 years in leadership roles within the UK roadbuilding industry, including winning a national safety award when he was 25 for a quarry that he managed in Swanage, in the south of England.

Now, over 30 years since he won that award, he has established a movement that centres leadership on what it means to be human, the Champions Movement, taking this message of humanity to the wider world. Healthcare, young people and families are its primary focus.

Before the difficult answers, the starting point: most of this works, and it works well — a personal experience

On Sunday 14 June 2026, I took a phone call around midday asking whether I was a relative of Janet Ford. When a call begins like that, you know the next sentence is not going to be good.

My wife had fallen whilst horse riding. She was alone, and wholly reliant on somebody coming to find her. She had broken six ribs, collapsed a lung, broken her collarbone and lacerated her spleen. Her pain was through the roof.

What followed was the NHS at its best.

Paramedics arrived quickly. Lincoln County Hospital admitted her, treated her, and liaised with the specialist trauma unit at the Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham. It is a regional hub, one of the busiest specialist trauma services in the UK, part of the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, serving more than 2.5 million residents locally and many more across the region.

She was 'blue-lighted' to Nottingham, a road trip of about 90 minutes, when it was clear her pain levels were more than Lincoln could support. She tells me that trip was its own experience. She was accepted into Nottingham later that evening and kept in for eight days.

In the months since, and having been her primary carer at home, we have found the care at Nottingham, Lincoln, and afterwards, to be excellent.

Our overriding feeling is deep gratitude — for living in a place and a time with access to exceptional healthcare, to Bevan, to those Welsh valley communities, to all those in the NHS who hold to its values, including those in Nottingham and Lincoln.

Around 1.5 million people in England go to work every day to look after strangers, people like my wife.

The great majority of what they do goes right. We are testament to that.

Building up, not tearing down

This paper argues to build on what already works.

And in particular, to draw on expertise established elsewhere on how to build 'humanity' into the fabric of what makes the NHS the NHS.

And it needs people who are not inside the chain of command

Every correction in this paper came from somebody who would not stop — a family that kept asking, a clinician who kept being a nuisance.

What none of them had was a network beyond their employer: the knowledge, the courage, and the collective strength to act together.

That is why I started the Champions Movement.

This sets out what building humanity into the fabric of an organisation actually takes — the individual, the community, and accountable leadership.

Below are three key takeaways:

1 Somewhere, the NHS lost its humanity

England now holds the most complete record of institutional failure ever assembled in healthcare, and it keeps finding the same thing.

This is a deeply uncomfortable headline, but it is true. Eight major national inquiries and reviews reported in the twenty-nine months to September 2026. Nine more are running, four of them due within the next twelve months.

Francis said it at Mid Staffordshire in 2013. Bristol said it in 2001.

The headline says 'complete record'. A defining benefit of the British system is the ability for self-criticism.

It may be painful, but pain is there for a reason and ultimately that is helpful.

The same mechanism recurs, with little variation, and it is a leadership sequence rather than a medical one.

• Concerns are raised and explained away.
• Candour is delayed.
• The regulator is shown a curated picture.
• And the person who spoke up is managed out.

Chester is the starkest proof, heartbreakingly so.

Between June 2015 and June 2016 a nurse on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester murdered seven babies and tried to murder seven more — fourteen babies, fifteen offences, one of them attacked twice.

When consultants raised the alarm, the hospital's leaders drew up a plan to "manage out" the doctors.

Thirlwall, reporting on 15 September 2026, found "a profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding" and "a total failure of safeguarding at every level".

The outside check failed too, and it failed in the hands of the doctors' own professional body.

The hospital invited in the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The reviewers had been told there was suspicion of deliberate harm, and one reviewer's own notes use the phrase "foul play".

The Inquiry puts what was missing in twelve words: "All that was necessary was to say we think you should call the police."

By 28 March 2017 the plan was to return the nurse to the unit. Staff had arranged a welcome tea party.

New leaders repeated the behaviour of the ones they replaced, which is how you know it is a system and not a few bad apples.

By 2022 the leaders of 2016 had gone. Four of the hospital's new senior leaders then ran a covert campaign to remove the chief executive brought in after the scandal, once she had raised a whistleblowing complaint.

A tribunal upheld her claims in full.

Her chief people officer — the executive responsible for how the hospital treated its staff — was permanently expelled by her professional body, having already moved to the same post at another trust.

At County Durham the warnings ran for more than a decade while the regulator recorded the trust as well-led.

Of 514 breast-surgery patients reviewed so far, 315 were harmed — 61% — including 20 women who had unnecessary mastectomies.

Concerns were raised in 2012. The review has just been extended to a further 5,000 cases, which the trust expects to take five years.

The Care Quality Commission rated the trust 'good' or 'well-led' for most of that period, on its financial and operational metrics.

What corrected it, every time, was a person who accepted a personal cost.

Seven consultants at Chester kept saying the same thing for eleven months. An official who was in the room in March 2017 remembered "the clinicians trembling".

At Durham it was peer review across a wider geography that flagged the anomalies, not the regulator.

In every case in this document the correction came from a family that would not stop asking, or a clinician who would not stop being a nuisance.

And the carers are running on empty.

The NHS Staff Survey 2025 asked 766,285 people. Only 43% feel their organisation values their work.

The other figures are stark as well: 31.5% are burnt out, 56% have gone to work while too unwell to be there, and 16.8% would leave as soon as they could find another job — an all-time high.

Half the doctors surveyed by the BMA report moral injury: knowing what good care looks like and being unable to give it.

One GP has written down what that does to a person. In August 2022 Dr Sarah Jacques walked out of her Monday morning clinic, drove to the seafront and sat there for six hours. She is still a GP, and she has published her account of it: Surviving medicine shouldn't be a test of resilience.

Her words for it are better than any survey: "That is not simply being busy. It is moral injury."

She is not an isolated case. On the General Medical Council's own current figures, 41% of doctors find it difficult to give patients sufficient care at least weekly — rising to 60% of GPs.

A workforce this depleted cannot be kind to anybody, whatever the values statement on the wall says.

And some staff carry something else on top of all that.

In June 2026 Lord Mann, the Government's Independent Adviser on Antisemitism, reported on antisemitism and other forms of racism in the NHS and its regulators. He made 24 recommendations. The Government and NHS England accepted them in full.

From the same staff survey: 11% of Jewish staff and 16% of Muslim staff had faced discriminatory behaviour from patients or the public in the previous year, and 13% of each from their own managers or colleagues. More than 20% of Black and minority ethnic staff faced it from patients or the public, against 5% of white staff.

Four years earlier the Health and Social Care Committee had said it was "horrified to hear clear evidence of racism within the NHS". Lord Mann's recommendation on holding leaders accountable for it is almost word for word the Committee's own, four years on.

And it reaches the patient. NHS England's own analysis found staff experience of discrimination to be among the strongest predictors of how well patients say they were cared for.

Humanity-first healthcare cannot be selective about who counts. That is not a bolt-on to the argument in this paper. It is the argument.

Social and children's care has its own deep issues, but the knock-on effect includes healthcare. Any strategy has to be joined up.

When social care and children's care fail, and when prevention is cut, people end up in hospital — and hospitals cannot discharge them.

This is an example: 669 children across the UK, with extreme needs, are currently held in illegal, unregistered children's homes, costing around £353m ($477m) a year. Some placements cost over £1m ($1.35m) per child per year. In some cases those children have then been abused.

This translates to two effects on healthcare (ignoring for a moment the tragic cases of the children involved).

First, they will have acute healthcare needs, and probably for much of their lives, in one way or other.

Second, it takes resources away from the very actions that are needed — prevention. Councils' spending on early intervention fell 44% between 2010/11 and 2022/23 while late intervention rose 57%. The cheapest help is the first thing cut.

And as of this week the Prime Minister has said the same thing.

On 27 September 2026, at his first Labour conference as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham committed to a national care service for England built on the NHS's own principles: free at the point of use, and paid for by everyone. "I'm going to rip the plaster off, if I can put it that way, because someone has to do it."

Note what he said about the people who cared for his late father, who had Alzheimer's. They "work day in, day out, with huge humour and humanity and skill in what they do … caring for other people's parents on poverty pay."

Humour, humanity and skill. Three intrinsic human qualities, named by the Prime Minister in one sentence, in the part of the system that is paid least and watched least.

There are no quick fixes. But there can be no serious review of the NHS that does not take social care, children's care and prevention with it.

2 You cannot regulate people to care

It has to come from within, and to last it has to be hard-wired into the fabric of the institutions.

This is about identity: own it, model it, live it — make it true.

When Bevan built the NHS, humanity did not need building in, because it was already in the room. Britain had just come through two world wars. People had queued, rationed, taken in evacuees and pulled neighbours out of the rubble.

What the country lacked was capability — hospitals, doctors, medicines, reach. So that is what he built, and he built it into law.

Seventy-eight years on we have the capability, and the thing he could take for granted has thinned: basic humanity.

For example, the share of young people with no close friends has risen from about one in 100 in 2014 to one in 20 today.

But for those reading this today, you do not need me to tell you. You already see it in your own world. Our basic humanity, what makes us human, is being eroded.

In the NHS, where people meet each other at their most frightened, that shows up in exceptionally painful ways.

When you lose your humanity, you lose everything — and that is most true under pressure, which for the NHS is the permanent condition.

What is built in survives pressure. What is left to chance does not.

Organisations are appraised on money and targets. How people are treated is measured every year, but almost nothing turns on the answer.

That is the gap. The values are written down and the staff survey asks about them, but no one's job depends on what it finds.

Small acts compound, and they are signals. Rudeness costs its target about a third of their performance, and each act that goes unchallenged makes the next one easier. Like near misses in safety science, incivility is an early warning of a system's health.

Expertise is no protection at all.

Germany's medical profession was regarded as the most advanced in the world in the 1930s, and became the profession most complicit in what followed.

Eighty years on, medical training worldwide has still barely absorbed the lesson.

And a system cannot heal itself.

Twenty-five years of internal reform have produced the same failures in the same words. As Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, "a prisoner cannot free himself".

It is not a funding problem, though funding is a real need.

The best-rated care in England comes from its least-funded part: about a quarter of hospices are rated outstanding, against about 6% of NHS acute hospitals.

Money without humanity fails too.

In November 2025 Lady Joan Branson died at a private hospital in Chelsea where money was no object; the coroner found her death "would have likely been prevented", and stressed it was not neglect. Nobody owned the task.

To be clear about the other direction too: money and safe staffing are indispensable. No amount of humanity substitutes for having enough people on a ward. What humanity changes is how well the capacity you do have gets used — and whether the people delivering it stay.

It is not a restructuring problem.

Health and social care have run as one system in Northern Ireland since 1973, and on waiting times it is the worst-performing of the four UK nations.

The Nuffield Trust found its integration "statutory rather than delivered in practice".

Where joining up care has helped, it came from people working around the patient, not from the organisation chart.

And it is not solved by borrowing someone else's model.

England imported Buurtzorg's self-managing nursing teams twice; both pilots faded within two years.

It imported Sweden's Esther question without the authority that made the question worth asking.

The mechanism rarely transfers. The principle usually does.

The current cost is already unsustainable and it is rising.

The NHS carries a £60.3bn ($81.4bn) provision for harm already caused — second only to nuclear decommissioning on the government's balance sheet.

It pays out £3.2bn ($4.3bn) a year, a quarter of it in legal costs, and loses an estimated £12.1bn ($16.3bn) a year to staff ill-health and cover.

None of that buys any patient any care.

These are the costs of the problem. They are not a claim about what any particular remedy would save.

On the current trajectory the next inquiry is already in the pipeline, and it will use the same words as the last one.

3 Humanity-First Healthcare: putting patients and staff at the centre, where they should belong

Humanity means the capacity to act for the good of others: it has to come from within.

It is the ability, under pressure, to see the person in front of you as a human being and do what is right for them. At its best it becomes instinctive.

It is what the miners of Tredegar did for one another from 1890, what Bevan scaled up to a nation in 1948, and what every inquiry in this document found missing.

One goal, three pillars.

The goal, taken from the NHS Constitution and widened to all care: the patient will be at the heart of everything.

1. Every person counts. Everyone is inside the circle of care — the patient who cannot speak up, the frightened family, the child in care, whatever their colour or creed, rich or poor.
2. Caring for the carers. People treat others the way they are treated themselves. Staff who are known, supported and treated with respect give kinder, safer care — and stay.
3. It's who we are. Humanity is not a programme or a poster. It is an identity, lived from board to ward, and protected by how leaders are chosen and judged, how services are measured and how people are trained.

It has to be built in, not exhorted — and that is the unfinished half of Bevan's settlement.

He wrote the money into an Act of Parliament in 1948, and that half has survived seventy-eight years and every reorganisation since.

The humanity was left to the professions, to training and to chance. That is the half that appears in every inquiry report.

Three things build it in, and none of them needs a reorganisation, new legislation or a heroic appointment.

1. The individual: teaching and practising the capacity to act for the good of others, so humanity is a trained capability and not a trait some staff happen to have.
2. The community: small circles that belong to a network beyond the employer, so there is always a route management cannot close — to call it forward when something is done well, and to call it out when it is not.
3. Accountable leadership: trust, so people tell the truth early; forgiveness, so an honest mistake does not have to be hidden; and being held to account, so forgiveness is not mistaken for indifference.

The people who hold the line need someone to hold it for them.

They get targeted, worn down and sidelined. The speaking-up score in the 2025 NHS Staff Survey is at a five-year low, and the National Guardian's Office closed on 30 June 2026.

Bevan himself held a line for three years against his own Cabinet and a profession that balloted roughly nine to one against him — with a Cabinet majority behind him, which is the point.

Holding the line takes choice, connection and creation. It is a team effort, and champions need champions.

Britain is the country best placed in the world to do this, and the reason is uncomfortable.

It has the failures documented to a standard no other country can match.

It has the values already written into a constitution.

It has the measurement — 766,285 people asked every year how they are treated.

And it is one system, so what works can land everywhere.

But somehow it has lost the soul that inspired Bevan and inspired the NHS itself, and inspires a population that consistently says this is important.

The spirit that began in the Welsh valleys and became the beating heart of the NHS is still there, in the 1.5 million people in England who go to work every day to look after strangers.

What was built once by ordinary people acting for the good of others can be built again.

After all, this is our NHS

Source notes

Every claim here is a matter of public record: a public inquiry, a regulator, a coroner or a peer-reviewed study. Most of it has already been admitted.

Every figure, source and caveat sits in the executive summary, the volumes and the annexes behind it.

Sterling figures carry a US dollar equivalent at $1.35 = £1.

↑ Back to the top · Read the executive summary →