Hi, I'm Anouche.

On today's New Statesman podcast, I'm joined by Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Health and Social

Care Select Committee, 2019 Tory Leadership Contender and former health secretary who's also

served as culture secretary and foreign secretary, whose new book, Zero, details how to eliminate

avoidable deaths in the NHS.

Thanks so much for joining us Jeremy.

Pleasure.

So, this book, the heart of it, is trying to work out how you eliminate unnecessary deaths

in the NHS and the steps that you found out when you were health secretary yourself was

that there are 150 avoidable deaths each week in the NHS.

Yes, it was a kind of light bulb moment when I became health secretary because the first

tragedy I had to deal with, the first of many sort of crises that you deal with in

a job like that was midstaffs and I remember being told by the chief executive of the NHS

that modern healthcare systems harm about 10% of all their patients and so I said to

how many actually die and being the good old NHS, we actually count this stuff much better

than most healthcare systems and they said about 4% of hospital deaths have a 50% on

more chance of being preventable which is where you get that 150 deaths a week but what

I didn't realise at the time but I now understand is this is not just about the NHS, this is

what happens in all healthcare systems around the world and I think the NHS by being the

most transparent about it could also become a world leader in putting it right.

Because that transparency is interesting isn't it because when you get the hot seat and you're

in your new department, you actually want your officials to give you letters from patients telling

...