Any day now, the report of the biggest-ever independent inquiry into calamitous events in the NHS will be made public. Six years after the lid blew on the high death rates among babies undergoing complex open heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, we are finally going to get the definitive version of what went wrong, who in the top echelons knew about it, but did nothing, and what reforms - across the whole of the health service - are necessary to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.
That's a tall order. But Ian Kennedy QC, who chaired the inquiry, was more than up for it. At the time the then health secretary Frank Dobson appointed him, the government was keen to keep doctors off balance. A long series of scandals erupting into daylight in front of disciplinary tribunals of the General Medical Council - Rodney Ledward and Richard Neale among the most horrifying - meant that the profession was on the ropes, which was just what government wanted while it pushed forward a radical reform agenda. Ministers talked up the Bristol inquiry so that it would hang over the profession like Damocles' sword. Professor Kennedy surely recognised that he had a chance to carry out the most thorough and penetrating review of the way the NHS works ever undertaken by an outsider.
He and his team have done it, and it is now sitting on health secretary Alan Milburn's desk. The department has promised it will be published before the recess, but with just weeks to go, the speculation is mounting that the report is explosive.
What it will not be is an indictment of the three doctors who were hung out to dry by the GMC before the inquiry began. The two surgeons who did not recognise that their death rates were unacceptable and did not stop operating, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, together with the trust chief executive, John Roylance, will not be exonerated, but the blame that has been laid exclusively on their shoulders is going to be shared with many others - from other referring doctors who could have sent patients to hospitals with better success rates up to the Royal Colleges, the GMC and the Department of Health, who all played their part in ignoring the problem.
But at the core of the disaster is not who knew what and when, but why there was such a massive wall between the medical profession on the one side and the patients - which includes all of us as potential patients or relatives of patients - on the other.
Professor Kennedy has the chance to demolish that wall - or at least incite the government to do so. Bristol parents Maria Shortis and Trevor Jones, who have started an organisation called Constructive Dialogue for Clinical Accountability, point out that when doctors told them their child's chance of pulling through, they were given national averages, not the data for Bristol.
But it isn't just about publishing league tables of surgical results. It is about changing attitudes within the medical profession.
Professor Kennedy will have some strong and radical ideas, without a doubt. We have to hope that any potentially embarrassing conclusions he has drawn about government will not lead to Milburn sneaking out this most important report on the last afternoon before parliament breaks up for its summer holidays. The Bristol report needs space and time for real debate - the parents are owed it, if nobody else.
* The annual European fertility conference is a jamboree of high excitement and expectations, where scientists lob their latest ideas and experiments into the fervid atmosphere. The presentations, this year at Lausanne in Switzerland, swing from the edge of the possible to the improbable and the undesirable. Cloning may be ethically unacceptable pretty much everywhere, but it becomes clear there are strip-lit labs all over the place where men and women in white coats are experimenting with removing the nucleus from a human egg and throwing in bits of genetic material.
If asked, they will tell you that it's all in the interests of fulfiling the basic human need to have a baby. But I couldn't help wondering whether it wasn't mostly inspired by different primal instincts - the urge to find out, coupled with the desire for advancement.
For most infertile couples in the UK, techniques on the cutting edge of science are pretty irrelevant. What they vitally, desperately need is more generous funding by the government for a few attempts of bog-standard test-tube mixing of sperm and egg. How about three cycles per couple, Milburn? Or even two? And then you would have more right to talk about eliminating inequalities in healthcare in this country.
