Historical reports and source archive

Some of these reports are hard to find today. We want to keep them available and explain what each one says. We keep the original documents unchanged and identify who wrote them and when.

Who was the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI)?

CHI was an independent public organisation set up to check the quality and safety of care in the National Health Service (NHS). It inspected NHS organisations, investigated serious failures and published reports explaining what needed to improve. CHI looked at how healthcare systems worked. It was not the police and did not decide whether an individual doctor could keep practising.

CHI was replaced by the Healthcare Commission in 2004. In 2009, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) took over the Healthcare Commission’s work in England. CHI no longer exists, but its reports remain important evidence about problems patients faced and what was recommended at the time.

Below are two original CHI reports from 2001 and 2004. Each has an introduction explaining why it matters and what we can—and cannot—conclude from it.

The original 2001 and 2004 Commission for Health Improvement reports are preserved here unchanged under their stated non-commercial reproduction terms, with source and copyright information. The 2007 government response is linked to its official copy; permission to republish the complete facsimile has not been established. Privacy and website information

Each report page explains which points come from the original publisher and which are PSS’s own comments. The publisher’s name and copyright notice stay with the original document. We do not alter historical reports or present them as PSS investigations.

This is a selected collection, not every report on the topic. Similar problems appearing years later do not prove that an older recommendation was ignored. See Then and now for the provisional comparison.