Private lesson

The death of Laura Touche after the birth of twins at the Portland hospital three years ago was a terrible personal tragedy. It also held a wider lesson. Her husband was entirely right to overturn the original coroner's verdict of death from natural causes in order to expose a frightening story of medical incompetence at a famous private hospital.

It is a story that ought to act as a corrective to the knee-jerk assumption that all the problems of the NHS will be solved only by greater use of the private sector. Private hospitals, nursing agencies and insurers are not consistently more efficient or safer than the NHS. But neither is the public sector automatically better than the private. The variations in death rates in the NHS make this clear.

However, the broader point is as true for health care as it is for education or railways. The search for better public services should be open to good ideas and good practice from wherever they come. Mrs Touche's death should act as a warning that lax procedures and poor management can be found in both public and private sectors, and that equal vigilance is needed in both.