THE parents of a woman who died at Crosshouse Hospital as a result of failings by NHS Ayrshire and Arran have backed calls for more prosecutions when preventable deaths occur.

Janette and Ian Black’s daughter Nicola took her own life after being admitted to a mental health ward at the hospital in 2010.

NHS Ayrshire and Arran was eventually prosecuted in 2014 and fined £50,000 for health and safety breaches in relation to her death.

Now a former health regulator is calling for Scottish ministers to set up an independent healthcare watchdog to ensure that care failings are properly investigated.

According to former Crown prosecutor for the Health and Safety Executive Roger Livermore, dozens of prosecutions should have been pursued against NHS Ayrshire and Arran under health and safety laws but were not.

He made the claim last week after analysing more than 80 incidents of care failings at the health board, released under FOI legislation.

Speaking to BBC Scotland for the first time following the prosecution, Mr and Mrs Black said: “Nicola died unexpectedly, in a hospital where we would have expected her to be safe and secure.

"We were thrown into a legal process which we knew little about and were forced to challenge and chase along.

“It was only when the case was transferred to a specialist unit in Glasgow – the Serious Incident Unit – that we were contacted and told it was possible that there would be a Health and Safety at Work prosecution.” Her husband Ian added: “There needs to be a public inquiry into the NHS and how it operates the Health and Safety at Work Act.

"The NHS in Scotland has to comply with legislation that covers the whole of the UK.” Mr Livermore claims to have revealed further cases – including another avoidable suicide – which could have been prevented and around 50 which should have led to a prosecution under the Health and Safety at Work Act. But the boss in charge of patient safety in NHS Scotland rejected the claims, arguing a ‘blame culture’ would set back progress in tackling safety in the service.

Professor Jason Leitch, Clinical Director in charge of the NHS Scotland’s Patient Safety Programme, said: “Health and safety legislation exists for a very good reason and applies in all workplaces, but what it doesn’t apply to is the kind of individual patient harms which occur in healthcare systems.

“I’m very confident we have layered levels of scrutiny which deal with those issues competently.” He added: “The literature says that external motivators get you a fear culture, temporary change and completely hampers any level of innovation.

“It should be used – but sparingly. It should exist for people who deliberately harm people.

“Internal motivators capture why workers went into these workplaces in the first place – to care for people – and creates a just culture not a blame culture.

"This, in the end, leads to sustainable change.

"All the high-performing healthcare systems in the world concentrate on this element for motivation.” NHS Ayrshire and Arran declined to comment.