How I Ruined Medicine

Dr Phil Hammond says, "Doctoring used to be like Downing Street. Posh unaccountable alcoholics working silly hours, cocking up, covering up and laughing it off in the mess. Above all, it was fun. Then I broke ranks and ruined it. For 37 years I worked in the NHS and exposed its darkest secrets, through Private Eye, on stage and on screen - for example, BBC2's Trust Me, I'm A Doctor.

I broke a story of babies dying after heart surgery in Bristol which became the subject of the largest public inquiry in British history. I gave evidence and argued that doctors could not be trusted to regulate themselves in secret, and we needed absolute transparency of data, so patients could see, choose and access the treatments they deserved. Only this could improve the NHS. In 2001, the Inquiry made 198 recommendations to ensure the NHS would embed quality, safety and transparency at its heart.

My campaigning and aggressive exposure helped spawn an army of regulators, lawyers and aggressively informed patients demanding excellent care in a collapsing service. Instead of fixing the NHS, I appear to have made it worse. The NHS now has 133,000 vacancies, over seven million waiting for treatment and too many doctors are retiring early or jumping ship to Australia. There is a mental health crisis among staff who suffer the moral injuries of being unable to deliver a decent standard of care, yet are punished if they speak out.

Using archive from the BBC, Private Eye, newspapers, my seven books, I take a mea culpa trip around the NHS to try to better understand the mess it's in."

Part of BBC Radio 4's Archive On 4 series.