The Stafford Hospital scandal concerns poor care and high mortality rates amongst patients at the Stafford Hospital, Stafford, England, during the first decade of the 21st century. The hospital was run by the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, and supervised by the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority. It has been renamed County Hospital. The scandal also resulted in the resignation of NHS Chief Sir David Nicholson in 2013. History Discovery of scandal Julie Bailey, whose mother died in Stafford Hospital in 2007, started a campaign called Cure the NHS to demand changes to the hospital. She was supported by the Staffordshire Newsletter, but the Public and Patient Involvement Forum and the Governors of the Trust were defensive. The scandal came to national attention because of an investigation by the Healthcare Commission in 2008 into the operation of Stafford Hospital in Stafford, England. The commission was first alerted by the "apparently high mortality rates in patients admitted as emergencies". When the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which was responsible for running the hospital, failed to provide what the commission considered an adequate explanation, a full-scale investigation was carried out between March and October 2008. Released in March 2009, the commission's report severely criticised the Foundation Trust's management and detailed the conditions and inadequacies at the hospital. Press reports suggested that because of the substandard care between 400 and 1,200 more patients died between 2005 and 2008 than would have been expected for the type of hospital, based on figures from a mortality model, but the final Healthcare Commission report concluded that it would be misleading to link the inadequate care to a specific number or range of numbers of deaths. The Healthcare Commission criticised the foundation trust board, which was led by chief executive Mr Yeates and chairman Ms Brisby, for holding in camera board meetings and "for making cutbacks to staffing and services in order to make millions of pounds' worth of surplus at the end of each year," because "bosses focused on the Trust achieving millions of pounds surpluses over a three year period, in order to gain Foundation status", a goal which had been fostered by successive governments setting target dates by which all NHS trusts were supposed to have reached NHS foundation trust status. For example, in 2009, the Department of Health was announcing "A new type of NHS hospital". The trust's chief executive, Martin Yeates, was