This website is intended for healthcare professionals
This website is intended for healthcare professionals
Associate Professor, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
‘Treating over a million people a day in England, the NHS touches all of our lives. When it was founded in 1948, the NHS was the first universal health system to be available to all, free at the...
‘We contend that part of the ongoing muddle about safety cultures stems from this lack of focused attention on the nature and implications of justice in the field of patient safety.’ .
The problems with maternity and neonatal services in East Kent, as highlighted by the independent review, are a salutary reminder of the terrible patient safety issues that can occur:.
Lord Woolf 's Civil Justice Review, Access to Justice (Woolf, 1996), changed the face of civil litigation in England and Wales. The reforms brought about judicial case management. Judges became the...
This discussion raises the issue of what is primarily driving the development of an NHS patient safety culture and how these aims could be seen negatively by nurses, doctors and other stakeholders....
‘Clinical competence was substandard, with deficient skills and knowledge; working relationships were extremely poor, particularly between different staff groups, such as obstetricians,...
‘In health we focus too much on the consequences, looking backwards at what has gone wrong. We need leaders to stop harm in advance, identifying and managing the causes and the controls.’
‘Staff were disrespectful to women and disparaging about the capabilities of colleagues in front of women and families. A family member heard a consultant describe the unit they were in as “unsafe”...
Henrietta Hughes, the Patient Safety Commissioner, has shared her ideas on several patient safety matters (Hughes, 2023). These include the need to hear more of the views of patients at trust board...
‘All these symptoms, according to NICE guidelines, should have immediately raised a red flag for sepsis (blood poisoning) in children under five. In the hospital's own Serious Incident Report, a...
I see this happening in some debates about reforming clinical negligence litigation. We often hear clarion calls for clinical negligence reform and the need to safeguard scarce NHS resources, which is...
Never Event data show the issues of poor NHS communication strategies in a tragic light. Many of these terrible events would not have happened had good communication strategies been in place. NHS...
‘If it is rolled out widely, scientists say people will be able to diagnose themselves with the illness without going to the doctor and costs for the NHS should fall.’
The key issue for me is the extent to which the advice and recommendations made in the reports are acted on in the NHS and whether safer practice results. As we closed the year, the Institute of...
‘This unsustainable situation is driven by an outdated legal system rather than deteriorating clinical standards. Legal reform is desperately needed.’
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