Similarities and differences with Stephen Moir

Series 8 closes with Shaun Lintern, Health Editor at The Sunday Times, unpacking the recurring failures behind NHS scandals: institutional defensiveness, taskification of care, and organisations that stop listening to patients and families. Shaun Lintern and host Matthew Winn draw on personal experience of bereavement to examine duty of candour, risk aversion in discharge decisions, and the case for professional regulation of NHS managers. A frank conversation on what it actually takes to stop preventable harm before it happens.

Paula McGowan, Oliver’s mother, founded the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism after her son died in 2016 following a series of catastrophic clinical failures, included the repeated administration of antipsychotic medication that Oliver had formally and clearly said he must never be given. Oliver was a footballer who played for England, a Paralympic hopeful, a young man with autism and a mild intellectual disability who was full of life, full of tenacity, and treated, in Paula’s words, as less than. What followed his death was remarkable: a parliamentary petition written alone in the Australian bush, 64 free presentations in eight weeks, and a campaign driven not by anger or blame but by a conviction that clinicians weren’t being given the tools to do better. That training is now statutory, written into NHS contracts, and has achieved 85% positive feedback to government. Paula’s message to leaders is unsparing: listen, be curious, get into the middle ground, and never allow an organisation to make you into something you don’t want to be.

In this deeply moving episode, Matthew Winn speaks with Andrea Brady, mother of Jessica Brady, who died in 2021 at just 27 years old from stage 4 adenocarcinoma of unknown primary — a cancer that had spread throughout her body before it was ever diagnosed.

When Dr. John Gerrard went into hospital for a routine procedure, his family did what they were told and stayed away. Within weeks, the man who had been alert, mobile and smiling had lost his speech, his ability to eat, and his will to live. He died within six months. His daughter Nicci Gerrard and her friend Julia Jones asked each other a simple question: if it had been one of our children, would we have allowed ourselves to be turned away? The answer changed everything. In this episode, Julia tells Matthew Winn how that kitchen table conversation became John’s Campaign — a voluntary movement that has reshaped how the NHS thinks about family carers, and why the fight is far from over.

William Mead was a healthy, happy child. He was 17 days past his first birthday when he died from sepsis that should have been caught. His mother Melissa wasn’t listened to. The investigations that followed barely scratched the surface. But Melissa refused to let that be the end of the story. In this episode, she talks with raw honesty about loss, about fighting a system governed by fear, and about why the best apology in healthcare and in leadership is changed behaviour.