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Good morning. Yesterday the report into maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust was published. We already knew the conclusion – that more than 200 infant deaths could have been avoided with better care. The families of those who lost their babies have struggled for over thirteen years to have their case heard, often being met with a wall of silence and delay. Well, it’s all out in the open now. Yesterday on this programme the former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt spoke of a culture of blame which prevented people speaking out openly. It should be a shock, and yet it is only one of a number of reports suggesting there is something deeply wrong with the culture of our much-loved NHS. Two years ago, of course, we were clapping for carers in the middle of the COVID crisis. Yet I wondered then, even as I clapped, whether we weren’t engaged in some curious rite which was almost religious in nature, as though we were devotees, suppliants, bringing our tribute of praise and supplication as to a deity. It’s been said before that the NHS is the nearest thing we have to a national religion, but perhaps we haven’t recognised how that distorts our relationship with it, and how it might also be damaging relationships within it. I’ve been watching This is Going to Hurt – the painfully funny series based on Adam Kay’s memoir of life as a junior doctor on a labour ward. It’s not for the squeamish – there’s an awful lot of blood and body fluids. We see doctors and midwives and nurses fighting exhaustion, stress and fear. Everyone is on the defensive and conversations are snappy, sometimes abrasive. All the stereotypes are there in Adam Kaye’s memoir. The remote, patronising Mr Lockhart, the bullying Miss Houghton, the timid Shruti, Tracy the rather too saintly midwife – all very human, flawed, ordinary. Their roles and relationships seem not to support them but to make them cynical and distrustful even as mothers to be arrive hoping and praying for all to go well. The fact that we laugh at This is Going to Hurt suggests to me that we know something is wrong with our NHS. Hospitals are very hierarchical places. There can be pressure to ignore mistakes or explain them away. Perhaps things would change if hospitals did more to work from the bottom up rather than always top down. I saw a film recently about a hospital in another country where the lowliest cleaner, the most junior ward clerk and humble support worker were expected to report anything wrong or unusual without the fear of being silenced or humiliated. If everyone matters we may all have less to fear.