The nurses who allowed elderly people to be treated with such disdain are not likely to be monsters.
Although their behaviour was, at times, monstrous - elderly people being left in urine-soaked clothes for 90 minutes, for example.
The central problem is unlikely to be a lack of training. The report suggests that even in hospitals where there was very poor care of the elderly, there were examples of good practice too.
Nor will it be a lack of awareness of the issue. The treatment of older people is a media mainstay. It's never out of the news, sadly.
Maybe, they've just forgotten that there are other people in the world apart from themselves. They lack real empathy - particularly with the people in their charge.
Empathy is the ability to appreciate life from someone else's perspective and to act accordingly.
Simon Baron-Cohen, whose book Zero Degrees of Empathy - a new theory of human cruelty, suggested that some people are incapable of empathy. Narcissists, borderline and psychopathic personalities lack "affective empathy" - the ability to feel others' feelings.
Even so, it's highly unlikely that the nurses concerned would be this extreme. But it does point up what the extreme end of coldness actually looks like.
But maybe the answer to this challenge is in embracing empathy.
The risk is that a report will be published suggesting that "lessons have been learned" and further training is offered to errant professionals. If it turns into another checklist - already a criticism of the nature of care for elderly people - then it may simply miss the point.
Please save us from Czars and Task Forces. Enough already.
The idea of suggesting that because we'll all be old one day (all being well) and that we should treat others as we would want to be treated isn't likely to work.
It's a worthy principle - do unto others as you would want to be done unto - but this tenet appears to have little traction in today's, me-now-focused world.
It's not that people don't know what the right thing to do is. They must by now.
We all know we're going to die but it doesn't stop life-threatening behaviour such as smoking and drinking. Nor does the prospect of poverty in older age motivate people to invest in pensions whilst they are young.
One thing simple thing may be at the heart of this problem: getting nurses to feel other people's feelings.
How to address this?
Getting into someone else's shoes and seeing the world from their point of view is a powerful way of developing empathy. Even if you can't feel it because you lack the ability to do so, at least, intellectually, you can appreciate what life looks like from a different position.
Should we simply ask nurses to experience for a day the kinds of care that they have created for their patients?
What would this look like?
What if every nurse who was found to be wanting was required to go through a poor care day. It would comprise five key experiences.
1. Spending ninety minutes in soaked clothes would give one a sense of what that level of discomfort felt like. It would be going to far to use urine. But the point would be made.
2. Being denied food for the duration of the day. It was noted that food was delivered to patients when they were asleep and taken away before they woke up.
3. Being treated with disdain, disgust and resentment by those from whom they would normally expect care, support and warmth.
4. Being ignored for an entire day and being required to ask for something repeatedly for hours before anyone paid even the slightest attention.
5. Being made to feel utterly invisible - gaining a sense that the world would really be better off without them and the best thing they could do would be to go away to a corner and quietly die.
Then at the end of what would be a challenging day, alongside the usual flip-charting of lessons learned, key points and ideas for improvements, participants would be warmly embraced, made to feel special and that they really mattered.
Then they will appreciate that it doesn't take much to make people feel special. A warm passing glance, the time of the day and a sense that they matter. None of which really take any time at all.
It's no more than elderly patients ask for every day.