Langstaff's key findings What report says about 'a level of suffering that's difficult to comprehend'

A day of reckoning has arrived, more than 50 years since the first victims received infected blood. Here are the main points covered in the UK public inquiry’s final report.

- Rachel Hall

It could have been prevented The main message from the 2,527page report is that what is thought to be the NHS’s worst treatment disaster “was not an accident” and could “largely, though not entirely, have been avoided”.

Patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable”infection risks between 1970 and 1991, and this resulted from successive governments, the NHS and the medical profession failing to “put patient safety fi rst”, concludes the inquiry’s chair, Sir Brian Langstaff . 

Successive governments are primarily to blame for the “catalogue” of “systemic, collective and individual failures” that allowed the infected blood scandal to happen, though “others share some of it”, writes Langstaff , who has been hearing evidence since 2019. 

Ministers’ refusal to own up to failings “served to compound people’s suff ering”, resulting in a decades-long battle for the truth .

He asks why it took until 2018 for a UK-wide public inquiry to be established .

It is “astonishing” that this could have happened in the UK, causing a “level of suff ering which it is diffi cult to comprehend”, Langstaff states .

Tens of thousands of victims were affected

More than 3,000 deaths are understood to have resulted from the scandal. An estimated 1,250 people with bleeding disorders are thought to have been infected with HIV, about 380 of whom were children, and a further 80-100 in transfusion recipients.