Watchdog accused of hospital 'cover-up' still not fit for purpose, chairman admits At a meeting of the board, broadcast live on Your Tube, John Harwood said: "I regard the suppression of the internal report as disgraceful. It was absolutely appalling. We need to look more closely at who did what and whether all or any of the people involved are still working for the commission. Anna Bradley added: "The Grant Thornton report shows how much there is still to do in this organisation for us to feel it's a different organisation, behaving in a different way." Concerns about the maternity unit at Furness General Hospital in Cumbria came to light in 2008, but the CQC gave the Morecambe Bay trust the all-clear in 2010. A report has found that the health watchdog bosses were so concerned about how damning the review would be that they ordered it should never be made public and that it should be destroyed. Mr Prior admitted that despite the failings over Morecambe Bay, the CQC is still not capable of properly investigating hospitals. "We are not set up, we were not set up then, we're not fully set up now to investigate hospitals," he said. They are hugely complex, difficult organisations. Our job is to inspect hospitals and we were not doing it properly. He added: "We went [for] what is called a generalist form of inspection, so we would send people into hospitals who might have a background in social care or in the fire service or the police, who had not worked in hospitals before. I mean how could they go in to maternity services and give a proper inspection. Mr Prior, who took up his post with CQC earlier this year, told the programme: "This is a shocking state of affairs and I'm desperately sorry that this happened. It's hard when you look back on it to see how could this have happened? He insisted that the CQC is now being reformed and he was scathing about the organisation's management at the time of the alleged cover-up "There's an old saying the fish rots from the head," he said. The board and the senior executive were totally dysfunctional. That results in bad behaviour further down the line. The chairman, the chief executive, the deputy chairman have all gone and that is right, there was no pay-off or anything like that, they have gone. Mr Prior said he was not aware of the details of the Morecambe Bay case until Friday last week, but he added: "I have known for the last three months that we were not fit for purpose when it came to hospital inspections and that we had to fundamentally change the way we were doing it." Whistleblower Kay Sheldon, a non-executive director at the CQC board member who raised concerns about what was going on at UHMB, said her warnings had been ignored at every level, both within the organisation and the Department of Health. She said: "I raised the issues internally first, then within the Department of Health, then with the junior secretary, then with the secretary of state for health. I followed the process to a T before I decided to make a whistle-blowing approach to The Daily Telegraph. I should have been listened to at every stage and I should not have had to go to the lengths I had to. I was subjected to the most appalling treatment and that should shame the organisation and higher. She added: "I haven't yet had an apology." The father of a newborn boy who died at the hospital said claims that the health care watchdog covered up a failure to investigate are "shocking." James Titcombe's baby son Joshua died aged just nine days old in Furness General Hospital in 2008 after staff failed to spot and treat an infection, sparking a police investigation. Mr Titcombe said that the report showed a "multitude of very serious failures" and was "quite hard to believe." He said there were wider questions about the NHS, claiming evidence was given to the Francis Inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire scandal that there was "possibly ministerial pressure on the CQC not to cause trouble at that period of time." "These aspects haven't been looked at in the detail that I believe they need to be looked at," he said. The CQC has come under fire in recent years for failing to protect patients and prevent a series of scandals, as it relied on "tick-box" systems which let hospitals vouch for their own safety. It has announced plans for a more rigorous inspection regime and Ofsted-style ratings. None the less, the regulator is expected to become embroiled in a deepening scandal. The independent report suggests that senior managers were more concerned about protecting CQC's reputation than about the lives of patients when they ordered the suppression of the review. It concludes: "We think that the information contained in the report was sufficiently important that the deliberate failure to provide it could properly be characterised as a "cover-up."" The report by Grant Thornton, was ordered by David Behan, who became chief executive of CQC last summer after his predecessor stood down. The report describes a CQC official saying that he was ordered by a senior manager in March last year to destroy his review because it would expose the regulator to public criticism. Tim Farron, the president of the Liberal Democrats, said the report suggested an "appalling failure" by the CQC. "What the report today demonstrates is that it would appear that there was a deliberate suppression of facts that, had they come to light, could have saved lives," he said. That is bordering on criminal and we need to look at whether it was criminal.