HPA was founded in 2020 by Joanne Hughes and James Titcombe, two parents who lost children due to healthcare harm. Although the circumstances of what happened to our children are different, we share the traumatic experience of being avoidably bereaved through healthcare harm, and our experiences of how the healthcare system responded are very similar. In both cases, instead of a caring response concerned with the enormous harms we had been caused and a desire to alleviate our suffering and try to make things right wherever possible, we perceived that the healthcare system prioritised other things, closed ranks, sought to minimise the information we were given about what had happened to our children and paid little attention to how we were suffering and what we needed. The impacts of this on us, and no doubt the staff involved in the care of our children too, was considerable extra stress and distress on top of our already enormous loss. As grieving parents, we found ourselves with only two choices; to accept only a partial acknowledgement of the truth and some signposting to bereavement support, or , in an attempt to have our children dignified with the truth, and have our needs met,  to navigate complex, protracted and very often brutal  systems of complaints, investigations, claims, appeals, and regulation, that caused immeasurable avoidable harm, to us and everyone else involved, and went on for years. 

Over the years we have met hundreds of families, very often people who like us, have lost loved ones in preventable circumstances due to problems with their care. These people suffer a double tragedy – life changing trauma and grief, followed by additional & avoidable harm by systems employed to respond to the events that are not ‘human’ and do not feel ‘just’

 We believe that people harmed by healthcare should be supported to both hear and be heard, to have complete understanding about what happened and to have the needs that the harm has created met. A collaborative and inclusive approach to acknowledging what has happened,  what must be learned for the future, and what must be done to try to put things right for those affected by this event.  This more restorative approach , that places those most affected by the event at the heart of its resolution, is for us a necessary component of any truly ‘Restorative Just Culture.’

We know many people feel very alone after experiencing healthcare harm, and need support and advice. We are constantly calling for  all those harmed by healthcare to have access to high quality advocacy, peer and psychological support. We are not a provider of advice or support services for harmed patients and families, we have no funding or support to be enabled to safely and equitably offer this. If you need advice, visit www.avma.org.uk, who have a helpline for those affected by healthcare harm.