DOUBLE JEOPARDY.....

Here in the Garden of England, we are perhaps unprepared to suddenly becoming the focus of national - perhaps even international - scandal. But in the last couple of days, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There`s probably no need for me to repeat all the unsavoury details here, but just to emphasise the fact that at least 90 people have died over the past couple of years as a result of contracting the `superbug` c. difficile whilst they were patients in Maidstone hospital. The number of patients who caught the bug but survived runs into hundreds.

The standards of hygeine in the hospital have been revealed as nothing short of deplorable - akin to those you might find in some backward third-world country. On second thoughts, that may be disrespectful to any backward third-world country that might be reading this and I mean no offence, but the UK is supposed to be a sophisticated, civilised, caring place....until, it seems, you get ill and get whisked away to hospital.

A couple of things really concern me as a resident living in the `catchment area` (how disarming is that description?) of Maidstone hospital. Now, I must proceed with caution, as there is likely to be a Police investigation as to whether criminal negligance might have accounted for the 90 victims. But it cannot be right for Government targets and financial management to take any sort of precedence over patient safety. As someone put it yesterday, "They`re supposed to be a hospital, not an accountancy firm."

And now we see that the Chief Executive, having no doubt been shown an advance copy of the damning report which revealed this tragic state of affairs, left a week ago by our old friend `mutual consent` and allegedly walked away with a large six-figure settlement. Smacks of a double whammy here - bad enough to be responsible for the seemingly avoidable deaths of 90 people, but the felony is compounded if the reports of the payout are correct.

This is no way to run a railroad and there is rightly a local and national clamour not just for more heads to roll, but also for the equitable safeguarding of taxpayers` money to be restored and - most pressing of all - for the hospital management to get their priorities right.